In his last book, The Loves of my Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), Edmund White writes these comments which I found interesting :
« The Pupil is one of the best gay short stories ever written, unless it’s Conrad’s The Secret Sharer – and he wasn’t even gay! »
« Now it seems to me all the most talented new novelists are gay – the Nigerian Arinze Ifeakandu; the Brits Thomas Grattan and Tom Crewe; in France, Édouard Louis; in Finland, Pajtim Statovci; in America, Garth Greenwell and Bryan Washington. »
« In the same period straight novelists tackled gay subjects. I’ve argued that the most brilliant gay comic novel is Pale Fire by that inveterate heterosexual Nabokov.
And Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, written in 1970 by a married Oxford don just three years after homosexuality was legalized in Britain, is the most three-dimensional portrait of a gay marriage, according to Garth Greenwell. »