Nocturnes for the King of Naples

“Artful vignettes from a life passed between Bohemian and cafe societies, in Italy and Spain, on a decaying American estate, on the New York piers … It is exquisite prose, gooey and fantastic as Italian pastry, mounds of it, piled on prodigally. Elegant plays on words abound … Proust, for a possible comparison, piled phrase upon phrase … Mr. White [is] a similar virtuoso … Nocturnes is a set of delicious … prose poems by a writer of great talent and high art.”

—John Yohalem, The New York Times

A “near perfect poetic effusion disguised as a novel, [written] in the voice of a younger man who rejects a sophisticated, well-traveled, and widely-admired older lover.”

—Nick Radel, The Gay and Lesbian Review

“Nocturnes for the King of Naples … is a confessedly baroque novel, a sequence of highly wrought addresses to an absent male lover … White at this time, like other gay artists before him, treasured the baroque aesthetic for its moral ambivalence, for making ‘little distinction between ornament and substance’—feelings hidden in digressions, in the expressive uncurling of a metaphor.”

—Alan Hollinghurst

“The most gorgeous evocation I have ever read of the 1970s gay male nighttown at New York’s old rotting piers, a twisted, rusting, metallic ruin of anonymous sex and unexpectedly sublime tableaus. I wanted to go there … an abundant, carnal and glittering place, populated by fearless, libidinal aesthetes.”

—Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review

“There are few novels which defy reviewing. They are the ones that provide us with unique reading experiences, which become valuable additions to understanding of the world and ourselves. Edmund White’s new novel is one of these … Some of the finest writing to be found in recent American fiction.”

—Doris Grumbach, The Washington Post

“A baroque invention of quite startling brilliance and intensity.”

—Gore Vidal

“White’s disarmingly gorgeous prose everywhere works transformations … Banal gestures become lavishly, ravishingly beautiful, making drama of perception … Some of the book’s mysteries remain unsoundable, at least for me, which is a quality I prize: one can return again and again, to the inexhaustible text … This edition provides an opportunity for a new and better reading of White’s second novel, one that sees its importance not just as an historic record or an essential document of a crucial career, but as a psychological study of complexity and depth, and a stylistic performance of an immaculacy seldom achieved.”

—Garth Greenwell, from the Foreword

“Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he’s certainly the contemporary writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading the most.”

—John Irving

“One of the most brilliant and distinguished authors at work in America today.”

—Patrick McGrath

“Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language.”

—Dave Eggers

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. His many novels include the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; he has published biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as memoirs, short stories, and criticism; in 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in New York City.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at NYU.