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Nocturnes for the King of Naples
A hauntingly beautiful evocation of lost love, Noctunes for the King of Naples has all the startling, almost embarrassing, intimacy of a stranger's love letters. The intense emotional situation envelops the readers from the first page; like all images in a dream, White's characters are the most real people we know, thought they remain phantoms. Each chapter, each nocturne, is set in a different emotional key, but all are interconnected through such subtle modulations that the final effect is devastating.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
59 people are currently reading
1902 people want to read
About the author
Edmund White
139 books911 followersEdmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
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September 5, 2019No rating for this one: I accepted almost immediately that this wasn't the book for me, and I won't hold that against it. Gorgeously written in a luxuriously overripe prose style, it felt like trying to grab hold of cascading liquid—a laughably futile pursuit. Occasionally I was reminded of the pleasures of reading Firbank, only one can cut themself on Firbank's unexpectedly sharp edges where this feels static and plush, like the shallow dreamstate of a nap after a long afternoon of daydrinking. The Mel Odom cover of this old Penguin edition is particularly lovely.
June 27, 2022
At one point in my life, this early novel from this prolific author was a tender evocative touchstone. It is ridiculous how many times I've read it. A lover and I used to highlight meaningful lines, and hand our copy back and forth. It was communication, it was dialogue, it was flirting. We were expressing things we didn’t even know how to say, or why they were important.
When I met Edmund White at a book festival, and told him all about our highlighted copy of Nocturnes, our communication through his poetic prose, he held my hand as we talked.
I’ve since discovered that this beautiful cover was artist Mel Odom's very first book cover!
When I met Edmund White at a book festival, and told him all about our highlighted copy of Nocturnes, our communication through his poetic prose, he held my hand as we talked.
I’ve since discovered that this beautiful cover was artist Mel Odom's very first book cover!
September 27, 2017
Literary zounds! I've been on a lucky streak lately. I'm finding these short-sharp-shocks of books are perfect antidotal medicine to whatever it is that ails me. I'd never read White, though his reputation for saying some pretty crazy shit precedes him, so I went in blind on the suggestion of a friend. My Lord, this is some lovely writing. This is almost sacred; some holy amalgam of pantheistic shout-outs and simultaneous inventorying of human anatomy. Let us compare tragedies?
The naysayers on Goodreads, of which there are a few I casually spy, must be those kind of people that require to have their hand held in a crowd despite the fact that they are a fully grown adult. Any aspersions of this not being linear or overly precious are a) bullshit; and b) that ol' problem that arrives when the wrong/unprepared reader gets their hands on a book and is so, so distraught to find that the book isn't what they wanted it to be. Read more, get more of the references, love your animals. The lower case J's dot themselves...
The fact that this is touted as "homoerotic" (twice in the jacket blurbs) or 'gay literature' is completely baffling to me. Because White discusses trysts (in terms High Romantic) with the same sex, it must be filed thusly? I don't get it, seriously. The book is emphatically NOT about being gay, it is about being alive and open to the current. That its author is gay informs the latter insofar that when referencing love or attraction he is doing so about another man...
[Counting down from 10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1. Nope! No plane just fell out of the sky, the clouds did not accede to the arrival of the Four Horseman, the chimera kept its wings folded, etc. We're good, Americans!]
Now of course if White (especially) or any of his reader's want to hang that assignation upon him, and he obviously seems more than fine with it, I'm hardly one to find fault in that. The only real risk as I see it is that compartmentalizing it will exclude it from the consideration of those purview-knackered breeders who wouldn't touch 'gay lit' with a ten-foot dick.
Whatever. I've lost my point entire and I tire, so I'll leave you with two things. One, if this is gay lit, then Women and Men must be categorized as 'hetero lit.' So hetero-normative it's in the fucking title! Two, this is a collection of vignettes, nocturnes if you must, that are impeccably written and bettered only by how absolutely tragic they are in beauty, decay, and loss. There are chapters (Mom and Timmy, the theater...) that hurt. All of which is good, as it is can serve as a connective tissue to the commonality of existence we all so fleetingly share. But only if we allow it to.
So I ask again: Let us compare tragedies?
The naysayers on Goodreads, of which there are a few I casually spy, must be those kind of people that require to have their hand held in a crowd despite the fact that they are a fully grown adult. Any aspersions of this not being linear or overly precious are a) bullshit; and b) that ol' problem that arrives when the wrong/unprepared reader gets their hands on a book and is so, so distraught to find that the book isn't what they wanted it to be. Read more, get more of the references, love your animals. The lower case J's dot themselves...
The fact that this is touted as "homoerotic" (twice in the jacket blurbs) or 'gay literature' is completely baffling to me. Because White discusses trysts (in terms High Romantic) with the same sex, it must be filed thusly? I don't get it, seriously. The book is emphatically NOT about being gay, it is about being alive and open to the current. That its author is gay informs the latter insofar that when referencing love or attraction he is doing so about another man...
[Counting down from 10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1. Nope! No plane just fell out of the sky, the clouds did not accede to the arrival of the Four Horseman, the chimera kept its wings folded, etc. We're good, Americans!]
Now of course if White (especially) or any of his reader's want to hang that assignation upon him, and he obviously seems more than fine with it, I'm hardly one to find fault in that. The only real risk as I see it is that compartmentalizing it will exclude it from the consideration of those purview-knackered breeders who wouldn't touch 'gay lit' with a ten-foot dick.
Whatever. I've lost my point entire and I tire, so I'll leave you with two things. One, if this is gay lit, then Women and Men must be categorized as 'hetero lit.' So hetero-normative it's in the fucking title! Two, this is a collection of vignettes, nocturnes if you must, that are impeccably written and bettered only by how absolutely tragic they are in beauty, decay, and loss. There are chapters (Mom and Timmy, the theater...) that hurt. All of which is good, as it is can serve as a connective tissue to the commonality of existence we all so fleetingly share. But only if we allow it to.
So I ask again: Let us compare tragedies?
June 18, 2024
Read this in two sittings. And the first word that comes to mind when thinking about this experience is “overwhelming.” Stunning cover art aside, I don’t know if I liked this novella, considering I didn’t know what was going on half of the time. It’s too abstract, overwrought, and perhaps overwritten. There are lots of gorgeous sentences and paragraphs here, but are their sentiments merely skin deep? The jury is still out. It probably deserves a reread, and I’m sure I’ll honor that in the distant future. So, for now, I’m giving it this rating.
———
I did highlight quite a few passages though. This one being the most evocative:
“In those days I was not yet the ghost I've become. Awakening in the middle of the night I would hear the squeal of tires on asphalt or the voice of a midnight drunk beseeching our windows, and I would resent your peaceful sleep, the measured rise and fall of your chest, not because it was breathing away my youth (I'd be young forever!) but because you were the living barrier between me and the danger I didn't want to digest, only devour. I pictured where my clothes were and in my imagination collected them, put them on and escaped you with the startling ease of a time-lapse film of an opening flower, its modest green petals blushing faintly, then exploding into rays of fevered scarlet.”
———
I did highlight quite a few passages though. This one being the most evocative:
“In those days I was not yet the ghost I've become. Awakening in the middle of the night I would hear the squeal of tires on asphalt or the voice of a midnight drunk beseeching our windows, and I would resent your peaceful sleep, the measured rise and fall of your chest, not because it was breathing away my youth (I'd be young forever!) but because you were the living barrier between me and the danger I didn't want to digest, only devour. I pictured where my clothes were and in my imagination collected them, put them on and escaped you with the startling ease of a time-lapse film of an opening flower, its modest green petals blushing faintly, then exploding into rays of fevered scarlet.”
July 26, 2008
This was a hard book to get into - a cross between John Berger and Edith Sitwell - all purple velvet and longing... the first few chapters are barely linear, mostly quivering sensations; I don't mind this but if a book does it from the outset I can find it hard to echolocate, get a sense of where I am.
A paean to a lost, dead lover, an older man whom the narrator has treated with the callousness of youthful narcissism. Of course, time wreaks its own revenge - he in turn loses his looks and becomes the older one, suffering cruelties that are justly meted out.
It covers a childhood of privilege and disjunction, heroin-addicted daddies, half-naked mistresses, a son abandoned to a boarding school with little allowance but a ridiculously large account at a bespoke tailor.
I enjoyed its languor and excess - all the baroque threadbare beauty of a faded chaise falling into shreds in the corner of a drawing room in Palermo. Lampedusa, anyone?
A paean to a lost, dead lover, an older man whom the narrator has treated with the callousness of youthful narcissism. Of course, time wreaks its own revenge - he in turn loses his looks and becomes the older one, suffering cruelties that are justly meted out.
It covers a childhood of privilege and disjunction, heroin-addicted daddies, half-naked mistresses, a son abandoned to a boarding school with little allowance but a ridiculously large account at a bespoke tailor.
I enjoyed its languor and excess - all the baroque threadbare beauty of a faded chaise falling into shreds in the corner of a drawing room in Palermo. Lampedusa, anyone?
January 8, 2009
Edmund White has always been a bit of an enigma for me.
He cites such influences as Nabokov, Proust, Genet, and Mishima; yet claims Joyce Carol Oates as his muse. He's continually revered by critics and academics, yet he continues to largely go unnoticed. He writes some of the most beautiful sentences you'll ever read (especially in regards to the American canon), yet very few people read his novels.
It's maddening.
It's sad.
But it's true.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples is an incredibly beautiful novel. It's deeply poetic and cryptic -- whatever it lets the reader see, it's always through a lens that is out of focus and greased.
It's like the novel that Hart Crane never wrote.
It's an ethereal ode to an ex-lover; somehow both detached and sentimental. If you can figure out what it's trying to tell you, it just might make you cry.
He cites such influences as Nabokov, Proust, Genet, and Mishima; yet claims Joyce Carol Oates as his muse. He's continually revered by critics and academics, yet he continues to largely go unnoticed. He writes some of the most beautiful sentences you'll ever read (especially in regards to the American canon), yet very few people read his novels.
It's maddening.
It's sad.
But it's true.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples is an incredibly beautiful novel. It's deeply poetic and cryptic -- whatever it lets the reader see, it's always through a lens that is out of focus and greased.
It's like the novel that Hart Crane never wrote.
It's an ethereal ode to an ex-lover; somehow both detached and sentimental. If you can figure out what it's trying to tell you, it just might make you cry.
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June 2, 2024If Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon were a gay novella, this would be it.
Read
October 12, 2017A wonderful early novel by one of our elder statesmen of gay lit. I can't help wondering if White wasted his talent by becoming, post-ACT-UP, a semi-official spokesmen for homosexuals in this country. Nocturnes suggests he had the potential to do something entirely different, become a literary artist more akin to Proust or Genet.
June 26, 2024
Really impressive prose but rubbed me the wrong way at times-- too ornate, too flowery. Good story and I will at some point do a re-read, because so many reviews have raved, so I wonder if there's something I'm missing.
January 3, 2021
Beautiful
November 13, 2024
beautifully written, but in many parts the language used is so floral and baroque it felt like i was have a stroke
September 25, 2024
Saw this book with an intriguing title in McNally Jackson SoHo after a Saturday brunch and immediately added it to my reading list. This is a poetic dedication from the author (protagonist?) to his much older lover, the “King of Naples”.
One of those books that poetically talk about the ~ soft life ~ of the old moneyed who have monogrammed towels, throw dinner parties, and are surrounded by hanger ons. The protagonist takes many lovers in many countries throughout his life, but his recollections always shift back to the OG King of Naples, and how each person he’s met is a poor imitation of the King. It was nice to be wrapped up in the sumptuous if not overly flowery imagery of this ~ soft life ~.
Introduction to the book
This “you” is the “King of Naples,” though that phrase appears only in the title: a distinguished, cultured man held in esteem by a court of distinguished, cultured friends, the “saints” who will continue to cross the narrator’s path long after the relationship’s demise. The older man saves the narrator—they meet in Spain, where the narrator, seventeen years old, still a high-school student, has fled his despotic, drug-addled father—and supports him, financially and otherwise, training him both in gay life and in the ceremonies of high culture. The narrator feels at once grateful for the older man’s protection and trapped by the safety he provides: “you were the living barrier between me and the danger I didn’t want to digest, only devour.” He is constantly aware of the older man’s “full, powerful life,” and aware of his own power, too, the power of beauty, of the beloved.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples is an account of the narrator’s search for the older lover he has lost. This search is geographical, and will take him to the places they traveled together: Rome, Fire Island, Spain. It’s also sexual, the narrator’s promiscuity a process of seeking the lover “in the bodies of hundreds of men I’ve ransacked, tearing them open as though surely this one must be concealing the contraband goods.” Most profoundly, it is a search through the past, the narrator scouring his avowedly fragmentary, unreliable memories for fragments of the “you” he addresses.
Excerpts
I’ve searched for you and not found you, attempted to forget you and found you everywhere, in foreign children, in my own childhood memories, in the bodies of hundreds of men I’ve ransacked, tearing them open as though surely this one must be concealing the contraband goods, only to throw them aside, meaningless raffia, and I’ve watched my own face age as I waited for your return, fearing I would no longer attract you should I ever see you again.
A moody, fragile girl lifted out of her daydreams and instructed to say clever things to adults and to expose her shoulders to tall men.
The saddest thing, the thing that makes me groan and step off the hotel porch into the night, is remembering how modern we all thought we were way back then. Old money, old names, these old houses were the legacy we ignored. For us there was only the figure in the foreground, standing so casually and confidently, yours.
As I looked at the other passengers, I could easily pick out those expressionless expressionless, intriguing beauties I address as you, those same faces, dark or fair, brooding or elated, whom I’d always believed I could love, even if I’d seen them only for a moment on a train or a bus or passing me on the street.
One of those books that poetically talk about the ~ soft life ~ of the old moneyed who have monogrammed towels, throw dinner parties, and are surrounded by hanger ons. The protagonist takes many lovers in many countries throughout his life, but his recollections always shift back to the OG King of Naples, and how each person he’s met is a poor imitation of the King. It was nice to be wrapped up in the sumptuous if not overly flowery imagery of this ~ soft life ~.
Introduction to the book
This “you” is the “King of Naples,” though that phrase appears only in the title: a distinguished, cultured man held in esteem by a court of distinguished, cultured friends, the “saints” who will continue to cross the narrator’s path long after the relationship’s demise. The older man saves the narrator—they meet in Spain, where the narrator, seventeen years old, still a high-school student, has fled his despotic, drug-addled father—and supports him, financially and otherwise, training him both in gay life and in the ceremonies of high culture. The narrator feels at once grateful for the older man’s protection and trapped by the safety he provides: “you were the living barrier between me and the danger I didn’t want to digest, only devour.” He is constantly aware of the older man’s “full, powerful life,” and aware of his own power, too, the power of beauty, of the beloved.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples is an account of the narrator’s search for the older lover he has lost. This search is geographical, and will take him to the places they traveled together: Rome, Fire Island, Spain. It’s also sexual, the narrator’s promiscuity a process of seeking the lover “in the bodies of hundreds of men I’ve ransacked, tearing them open as though surely this one must be concealing the contraband goods.” Most profoundly, it is a search through the past, the narrator scouring his avowedly fragmentary, unreliable memories for fragments of the “you” he addresses.
Excerpts
I’ve searched for you and not found you, attempted to forget you and found you everywhere, in foreign children, in my own childhood memories, in the bodies of hundreds of men I’ve ransacked, tearing them open as though surely this one must be concealing the contraband goods, only to throw them aside, meaningless raffia, and I’ve watched my own face age as I waited for your return, fearing I would no longer attract you should I ever see you again.
A moody, fragile girl lifted out of her daydreams and instructed to say clever things to adults and to expose her shoulders to tall men.
The saddest thing, the thing that makes me groan and step off the hotel porch into the night, is remembering how modern we all thought we were way back then. Old money, old names, these old houses were the legacy we ignored. For us there was only the figure in the foreground, standing so casually and confidently, yours.
As I looked at the other passengers, I could easily pick out those expressionless expressionless, intriguing beauties I address as you, those same faces, dark or fair, brooding or elated, whom I’d always believed I could love, even if I’d seen them only for a moment on a train or a bus or passing me on the street.
December 22, 2024
“As I wandered the city I found everyone touching and brave. Four twenty-year-olds out on a Saturday night, clustered in a corner of a bar and unsuccessfully suppressing the urge to dance, seemed heroic; they flirted with everyone who walked past them. Didn’t they know (as I did) that the best thing had already happened, that their long lives, that progression from this year’s hits and haircuts to next year’s, from a first job to a second, a sixth, from sitting over cold coffee at dawn in a diner to sipping wine at supper on a balcony in Haiti — that this long sequence of slightly varying incidents would give them only time to see the past from every angle, as though the past were a statue they kept pacing around in ever widening circles?”
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August 28, 2025"Just across the water you and I stayed. There. On the second floor. The room at the far end on the right. How we laughed when we ordered ham and eggs and got thin pink slices of meat on a bed of ice and egg salad. You're the only thing I ever saved. If a lady were to ask me I'd say love dwells in memory, moves in memory, is formed by memory, just as the evening light was formed in the curtains that screened it - but no lady asks."
Garth Greenwell ordered everyone to read this and I'm glad for it.
Garth Greenwell ordered everyone to read this and I'm glad for it.
July 6, 2024
This is very gay: baroque, obsessed with High Church shit, and a lot (and I mean a LOT) of longing. Very sweet to dip into (who doesn’t love a good champagne cocktail?), but too much will leave you sitting on a street curb, sick and weeping for that lover who got away.
March 1, 2007
Another one of my favorite boks. You need an open mind and an open bottle of wine to fully experience this novel.
August 21, 2008
My favorite of all his books.
August 2, 2018
While I love mature White, I couldn't stop cringing at this book's aimless lyricism. Read it if you're stuck on a plane with no alternatives. Or better yet, open the emergency hatch and jump.
February 21, 2025
“So many great men destroy the lives of those around them - lovers, wives. The wife imitates his extravagant vices at night but does not rise at dawn to pick her way through the party rubble to the study. She, too, consults the spirit world, winters in Greece, keeps odd hours, experiments with drugs, has a theory about evolution, hates Poulenc, listens to too much talk - but for her nothing comes of it. She becomes haggard and opinionated, while he stays pink-cheeked, curious, industrious. Eventually her enthusiasm narrows to macramé and vodka. Have I become your monster? Am I the ruined wife?”
A slippery, sometimes intangible meditation on love and loss and the profound impressions these fundamentals make upon who we are and become. A kind of treatise on yearning without the wish to return, of regret without the desire to go back and change anything. A journey to the depth of memory for no reason other than to relive and reflect upon such pivotal, unchangeable moments that define our lives. I found ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ beautiful, surprisingly coherent and just a little haunting.
The prose was truly beautiful, up there with some of the finest I’ve read, with a really affecting but lazy, almost dreamlike quality to it in places. Both incredibly evocative and incisive, with a surprising amount of substance behind its ornate quality, which retains it a level of clarity that consistently held it back from the too deeply absurd or the puzzlingly abstract. Everything was impressively intimated, clear enough, but with no need to lay everything out expressly; something that would have been not only unnecessary, but that might undermine White’s style entirely to the point of ruin.
The relationship between our narrator and the subject of his affections stood unwavering as the central column of the book. This really gave his otherwise meandering meditations something to orbit around, offering the novella a level of focus that made it feel comfortably linear and never confusing. A little enigmatic? Yes, incomprehensible? Never. The sections beyond this were just as consuming to me. Actually, one of my favourite chapters was the time our narrator spent with his father, a comically larger than life figure with a seam of darkness running deep within him. These sections managed to be both bleak and deeply funny, a beautiful combination.
I really love these McNally editions, the ratio of ones I’ve found to be total hidden gems to those that aren’t all they’re cracked up to be has been weighted so heavily to the former, and ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ is no exception. They have found me so many authors I otherwise might not have known of, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more of White’s work. The prose alone was enough to capture me, but the surprising solidity behind it is what made this work truly great.
A slippery, sometimes intangible meditation on love and loss and the profound impressions these fundamentals make upon who we are and become. A kind of treatise on yearning without the wish to return, of regret without the desire to go back and change anything. A journey to the depth of memory for no reason other than to relive and reflect upon such pivotal, unchangeable moments that define our lives. I found ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ beautiful, surprisingly coherent and just a little haunting.
The prose was truly beautiful, up there with some of the finest I’ve read, with a really affecting but lazy, almost dreamlike quality to it in places. Both incredibly evocative and incisive, with a surprising amount of substance behind its ornate quality, which retains it a level of clarity that consistently held it back from the too deeply absurd or the puzzlingly abstract. Everything was impressively intimated, clear enough, but with no need to lay everything out expressly; something that would have been not only unnecessary, but that might undermine White’s style entirely to the point of ruin.
The relationship between our narrator and the subject of his affections stood unwavering as the central column of the book. This really gave his otherwise meandering meditations something to orbit around, offering the novella a level of focus that made it feel comfortably linear and never confusing. A little enigmatic? Yes, incomprehensible? Never. The sections beyond this were just as consuming to me. Actually, one of my favourite chapters was the time our narrator spent with his father, a comically larger than life figure with a seam of darkness running deep within him. These sections managed to be both bleak and deeply funny, a beautiful combination.
I really love these McNally editions, the ratio of ones I’ve found to be total hidden gems to those that aren’t all they’re cracked up to be has been weighted so heavily to the former, and ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ is no exception. They have found me so many authors I otherwise might not have known of, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more of White’s work. The prose alone was enough to capture me, but the surprising solidity behind it is what made this work truly great.
December 28, 2021
3'5
Het boek voelt aan als een cameralens die steeds opnieuw tracht een een vierkant in beeld te brengen, om dan bij uitstek en met haarscherp detail de knop te kunnen meesteren wiens scherm — geheel onbescheiden — een cirkel weergeeft. Een verhaal verteld in zijn impuls; strak omlijnd door waas maar zonder schroom. “Jij” is herkenbaar. Ik evenzeer.
Het leest als een liefdesverhaal, lyrisch verteld door een kind die, gebeten door enthousiasme, het moment voorbijgaat om naar de volgende te sprinten. Bij momenten eerder een koortsachtige wandeling, die je a-ritmisch maar met volstrekt (on)begrip en oprechtheid, doet terugblikken op 'jou'.
Confronterend. Verwarrend. Écht.
Het boek voelt aan als een cameralens die steeds opnieuw tracht een een vierkant in beeld te brengen, om dan bij uitstek en met haarscherp detail de knop te kunnen meesteren wiens scherm — geheel onbescheiden — een cirkel weergeeft. Een verhaal verteld in zijn impuls; strak omlijnd door waas maar zonder schroom. “Jij” is herkenbaar. Ik evenzeer.
Het leest als een liefdesverhaal, lyrisch verteld door een kind die, gebeten door enthousiasme, het moment voorbijgaat om naar de volgende te sprinten. Bij momenten eerder een koortsachtige wandeling, die je a-ritmisch maar met volstrekt (on)begrip en oprechtheid, doet terugblikken op 'jou'.
Confronterend. Verwarrend. Écht.
July 16, 2025
Best way I can describe this book is a sun-soaked run-on sentence. The writing style was beautiful and the whole thing was incredibly immersive if not hard to follow at times with the timelines jumping around, but it felt like the confusion was almost the point. I really enjoyed the religious imagery throughout and thought the dynamic with the narrator’s father was really interesting. I always enjoy when a book is told by an unnamed narrator and I think that was perfected here.
August 28, 2024
Ooooof. This was such a slog to me. One of high hopes and an introduction that got me amped. But it took me a lifetime to get through these brief 140 pages.
It’s pretty but feels aimless and emotionally distant despite swirling around such a current of romantic tension.
Maybe I will enjoy this years from now. But alas… this was not my time.
It’s pretty but feels aimless and emotionally distant despite swirling around such a current of romantic tension.
Maybe I will enjoy this years from now. But alas… this was not my time.
September 24, 2024
This is one of the most beautifully written looks at what it means to love and be alive. The prose is on another level and while there isn’t much action you fall into the world crafted by White. While it isn’t necessarily “gay” in the sense that the love described could be to anyone, it definitely stands out as a quintessential piece of queer literature.
March 19, 2023
Disguised behind a novel, this continuous pieces of poetry are a beautifully confusing journey through Edmund White’s tangled memories. Adventurous melancholy narrated through stories woven into past and present, all through the story of a lover. Grieving and celebrating love and life.
July 12, 2025
This is the first McNally Edition to let me down. I can see why this book moves people: it’s all about regret and longing for a past relationship. The writing is so intensely lyrical that it’s basically poetry. It just didn’t move me at all unfortunately.
May 10, 2021
Poëtische selectie memoires. Jij vervalt in ik, bezongen met gehoorde, rauwe spijt.
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May 30, 2024Finishing Nocturnes for the King of Naples at the same time Garth Greenwell drops a New Yorker essay on it well what a day
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November 11, 2024Going straight into the reread pile as I zoned out a lot due to the space I’ve been in mentally lately, but the prose was gorgeous even if I didn’t always know where we were
January 11, 2025
Poetry in motion, selfish love
August 27, 2025
Beautifully written, but felt too poetic at times. Wanted more orgies than yearning.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews