powerHouse Arena To Host Book Launch for New Edmund White Novel

January 11, 2012 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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DUMBO — On Feb. 7 from 7 to 8 p.m., powerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., will host the book launch of Edmund White’s Jack Holmes and His Friend.

Jack Holmes is a recent transplant to New York, by way of the Midwest. He’s just out of college, a bit conservative, a bit shy and unsure of his sexual preferences. He’s also charming and handsome, and he neatly lands a job at a cultural journal. There he meets Will Wright, a Southern blueblood fresh from Princeton, and they soon become good friends, both adrift in the city.

But there’s a complication to the friendship: Jack is in love with Will. Troubled by what he sees as subversive longings, for Will and other men of the West Village, he sees a psychiatrist and eventually confesses his feelings to Will. Will, a heterosexual who is troubled by Jack’s feelings, remains his friend but drifts away to a life of marriage.

Still, over the two decades of an on-again-off-again friendship, from the first stirrings of gay liberation through the catastrophe of AIDS, Jack Holmes and His Friend tells the story of a friendship between two men that charts the sexual revolution from both gay and straight perspectives.

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and, most recently, Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton.