Peter Brooks' HENRY JAMES COMES HOME "charts a journey, clarifies an itinerary, and identifies the encounters in which a writer’s later reflections are rooted."
We at the Review mourn the loss of Edmund White (1940-2025). In celebration of his life and work, we’ve unlocked his Art of Fiction interview from our archive.
“The white male middlebrow canon”! As a teen I loved Hesse and Henry Miller but found the Beats mawkish. A related canon consists of writers whose reputations shed an attractive maudit glamor (Baudelaire, Mayakovsky), but who quickly showed they had much, much more to offer, and remain favorites.
‘For fifty years he has been involving us in questions about cinema – what it is, what it might be, whether it matters. Above all, he has insisted on beauty, and his films have us wondering whether beauty is truth or a trick.’
“The doctorate was also a good pretext for going to London. Mornings in the British Library and afternoons in the Warburg Institute. Or the opposite. An ideal life.”
“I’ve learned things about writing from each of them. Auden’s penultimate rhyming, Elizabeth’s way of contradicting something she’s just said, Stevens’s odd glamorizing of philosophical terms.”
We’ve unlocked our interview with James Merrill. buff.ly/376XqQQ
