Skinned alive

From the cover flap: With his most recent novel, *The Beautiful Room Is Empty*, the highly acclaimed continuation of his ground-breaking work *A Boys Own Story*, Edmund White was confirmed as one of our most eloquent novelists and our most influential chronicler of gay life. Now this dazzling collection of stories—his first book of fiction in seven years—establishes him as a master of the shorter form as well. Set in Europe and America, these eight stories (many of them autobiographical) explore the ways we make sense of personal experience: the workings of desire, in youth and later in life; the yearning for intimacy and love; the power of beauty and jealousy; and the unpredictable effects of illness and loss. In “Pyrography” a gay adolescent is torn between his sexual desires and his longing for acceptance as he goes on a camping trip with two straight male friends. An American in Crete finds a new reason for living after the death of his lover in “An Oracle” “Watermarked” is a moving tribute to a beautiful young actor, the subject of an early passion. And, perhaps the funniest story in the collection, “His Biographer” deals with the ludicrous experience of being the living subject of a biography; it brilliantly stages the meeting of Old World sophistication and New World political correctness. Moving, witty and full of audacious surprises, *Skinned Alive* delivers us to a world of comedy in the midst of tragedy, one peopled by a startling diversity of men and women. This book gives us the full range of Edmund Whites extraordinary powers of observation and his finely balanced, musical sense of structure.