You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

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

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Edmund White, the author most recently of Chenet, the monumental biography

of Sean Chenet, published by Knopf.

Also the editor of the selected writings of Sean Chenet, recently brought out by the Echo Press,

and of course novelist of, among other things, the beautiful room is empty,

nocturns for the King of Naples, Caracol, forgetting Elena and a voice on story.

To start off, why Jeanne?

Well, my favorite editor, Bill Whitehead, asked me if I knew anyone who could write a biography of Jean-Gene back in 1986 right after Jeanne had died, and I sort of timidly said, me, and Bill died right

afterwards, and I dedicated the book to him but in fact I think he was

Jeanne was a writer I had always admired since I'd first read him in the 60s in English I think

as a gay writer myself I admired Jeanne very much because he was the only one who was really sort of in your face

about being gay, who didn't present homosexuality as a disease but as a crime, who showed

the ghetto, who included a character in his books named Jean-Gene and who wrote in this

sumptuous style.

You know, in your own work, in nocturns, for instance, that Docum ruined cathedral

is very much a Jeunay kind of trope.

And so, too, at the end of a boy's own story,

the young man, having seduced his teacher,

...