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White, Edmund : Inside A Pearl: My Years In Paris

Bloomsbury Publishing, New York City, NY, 2014

ISBN 1608195821

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 260 pages. Book-length account on subject. One of Edmund White's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Edmund White's "Inside A Pearl: My Years In Paris". Yet another full-fledged book on the most-written-about, most tourist-invaded, and most photographed city of them all? Absolutely yes. This is the author's third book on Paris, preceded by "Our Paris: Sketches From Memory" (1995) and "The Flaneur: A Stroll Through The Paradoxes of Paris" (2001). Because for White, the allure of Paris remains inescapable and inexhaustible. She is like a kaleidoscope that he is able to see from so many different, illuminating angles. "When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the United States, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he had come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way. The book's title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known. White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: Both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. A memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment" (Publisher's blurb). An absolute "must-have" title for Edmund White collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Edmund White. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994 for "Genet". Anointed by Vladimir Nabokov as his American successor. One of the finest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER EDMUND WHITE TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1608195821.

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