The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

1988 • 240 pages

Ratings3

Average rating3.7

15

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age. "With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World


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Series

Featured Series

3 primary books

#2 in The Edmund Trilogy

The Edmund Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 released primary works first released in 1982 with contributions by Edmund White.

#1
A Boy's Own Story
#2
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
#3
La sinfonia degli addii

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My Edmund White-a-thon enters it's 3rd year and this is the 4th book and the 2nd in the so called Edmund Trilogy. Art, Sex and lots of self loathing, funny at times but mostly sad. Ends very abruptly during the Stonewall riots. I preferred this much more than A Boys Own Story,

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