In the following interview, White discusses the autobiographical nature of his work and what he thinks about literature.

In the following interview, White discusses his career and his life as a gay writer.

In the following review, Wood discusses White's The Burning Library and Skinned Alive.

In the following review, Mars-Jones lauds White's Caracole and says, "This suavely alien world can give intense and almost continuous pleasure."

In the following review, Bailey discusses White's States of Desire, and how the book deals with the issue of bigotry against homosexuals.

In the following review, Powell complains that, "As so often in the book, [The Burning Library White's admirable capacity for sympathetic understanding not only inhibits his critical judgment but actually weakens the case being argued."]

In the following review, Rose discusses the verbal stylization and psychological realism of White's Caracole.

In the following review, Dickstein discusses White's Skinned Alive and asserts that, "In writing about AIDS yet keeping it at bay, he has turned a mortal threat into a surprising source of literary strength."

In the following review, Lemon praises White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, but complains that "the ending's exhilarations [are a diminishment of the power and beauty of what had gone before."]

In the following review, Blaise asserts that White's The Beautiful Room is Empty "is packaged as an autobiographical novel, yet as a novel its flaws reduce its value and interest considerably."

In the following review, Dyson complains that, "The problem with Trios is that it plays as if real dramatic skill in writing and direction has not been applied."

The impressionistic novel is getting a new lease on life from Edmund White, whose dreamy "Forgetting Elena" had a success of esteem some years back, and who in his second novel has abandoned such concessions to the reader as linear storytelling. "Nocturnes" is a series of apostrophes to a nameless, evidently famous dead lover, a man who awakened the much younger, also nameless narrator not to sexuality … but to the possibilities of sexual friendship. Though he well remembe...

If there were a truth-in-packaging law for books, Edmund White's "States of Desire" would violate it. For he subtitles his book "Travels in Gay America" but rarely mentions lesbians, or settled homosexual couples, or homosexuals who are as interested in their work as in sex, or those who help one another kick drugs and booze rather than abuse them. Instead, he devotes most of his 336 pages to a journey through promiscuous, all-male America—a desolate place to live. ...

White is the co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex, perhaps the drolest example of that most persistent genre, the how-to-feel-good-about-being-dirty Baedeker, and States of Desire is a kind of Joy of Gay Society—middle-class society, to be precise. In its demure way, this is as didactic a treatise on homosexual experience as has ever been written. You will not read about rejection in this book—certainly not rejection by the author, who reserves contempt … for those souls who have allowed rel...

In [Nocturnes for the King of Naples], White resumes his exploration of the textuality of experience, but moves from ritual to romance. As its pretext, the novel evokes and is addressed to a lost, and therefore ideal, lover—presumably an older man who rescued the narrator, was later betrayed by him and died. In one sense, then, it is the Psyche's reminiscence of Eros, and its chapters are the narrator's meditations on the echoes of an original erotic transcendence in his subsequent affa...

[Forgetting Elena] utilizes a marvelously fresh and inventive narrative device right from the very beginning: an amnesiac young man gradually realizes that he is caught in a cross fire of several contending coteries who battle for dominance in a closely knit little social group on a summer resort island. The narrator-hero is eager to please his hosts and to do the socially accepted thing, but he has no idea of his own status within the group and he has forgotten the code for distinguishing the desirable fro...

Holden Caulfield was right, America is full of phonies. More of them infest the literary jungle than any other part of our society. When a writer wants to tell a trivial story he has to do it in style. Sometimes his style is original. More often it is copied from a fashionable giant, say Joyce or Kafka. Rafts and rafts of phony novels by unknown writers come floating down the literary waters. (p. 96) Edmund White's "Forgetting Elena" is a typical pastiche. Interesting at first, it dawdl...