Edmund White: The Unpunished Vice with Michael Carroll

Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading is a compendium of all the ways reading has shaped Edmund White's life and work. His larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's best-loved cultural figures. With characteristic wit and candor, he recalls reading Henry James to Peggy Guggenheim in her private gondola in Venice and phone calls at eight o'clock in the morning to Vladimir Nabokov--who once said that White was his favorite American writer.

Edmund White has written some twenty books. In 2018, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels ─ A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He has written a novel about love in the AIDS era called The Married Man; Marcel Proust: A Life; a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur; and a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. His works of fiction include Chaos and Hotel de Dream. His most recent book is Inside A Pearl: My Life in Paris; in April 2016 his new novel, Our Young Man, was published. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in New York City.

Michael Carroll is a writer whose work has appeared in Boulevard, Ontario Review, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, Open City, and Animal Shelter. He is the author of the short story collection Little Reef and lives in New York.