The Burning Library brings together forty of the best of Edmund White's essays, articles and reviews from more than twenty years, and presents a fascinating portrait of the writer and his time. Within a broad spectrum of interviews, profiles and essays, the collection focuses on the lietary and cultural figures whose work has influenced or intrigued White: Valdimir Nabokkov, tennessee Willaims, james Merrill, Michael Fucault, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roland Barthes, Christopher Isherwood, Juan Goytisolo, Marguerite Yourcenar. While their work is illuminated by White's pungent and sensitive criticism, the men and woman are brought to startling, vivid life by his gift for conveying quirks of personality and the oddities of place.
The book reviews are amazing, I've heard of very few of the authors but the reviews are of such a quality they are entertainment in themselves.
The essays especially the earlier ones about homosexuality have not aged well but they were written of a time and place . What staggered me was that until 1973 homosexuality was considered a mental illness.
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder
So White grew up in an era when his sexuality was considered treatable and with enough visits to the shrink you would be cured.
All in all a very good collection of essays, essays that can be re-read again and again.
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