The unpunished vice: a life of reading

Edmund White made his name as a writer, but he remembers his life through the books he read.

For White, each momentous occasion came with books to match: Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past,' which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality while he was at boarding school in Michigan; the Ezra Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of Stephen Crane that inspired one of White's novels.

Blending memoir and literary criticism, 'The Unpunished Vice' is a compendium of all the ways reading has shaped White's life and work.

His larger-than-life presence on the literary scene - he is close friends with giants including Michael Ondaatje and Joyce Carol Oates - lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's best-loved cultural figures.