Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Edmund White, the author most recently of Hotel

to Dream.

It's published by Echo, and we will be talking about that as well as what I take to be fascinating

about the career of Edmund White.

He seems to be very aware that literary styles pertain to particular times. And when I first started reading him, it was his

very first book, Donald Barthelmey handed me a galley of forgetting Elena, Barthlemy saying,

John Ashberry is trying to acquaint people with this writer. Would you like to read this galley?

And, you know, I read it.

It was a highly stylized novel,

followed by a still more highly stylized novel,

Nocturns for the King of Naples,

but then began a series of factual or fictional realities with a boy's own story and others like it. Most recently, with novels like Fannie or this new one Hotel to Dream,

the question of what literary realism and how it pertains to homosexuality is afoot.

And I would say the subject of this new book is literally that homosexuality is known in literature by the extremist of stylizations,

say Chenet or Proust or, for that matter, Fearbank, or Dennis Cooper. And the question becomes, how do we bring the homosexual to the real world?

How do we make him real?

...