VIRTUAL - Edmund White - A SAINT FROM TEXAS

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Edmund White will be in-conversation with Michael Schaub.

Edmund White’s novels are beloved for their wit, daring, and emotional honesty, and his latest is no different. Ann Beattie calls A SAINT FROM TEXAS “a brilliantly observed story about how we find ourselves by losing ourselves, about family bonds and how the harm done to us can warp us into something new.” Yvette and Yvonne Crawford are identical twin sisters, born to an oil-rich family in East Texas but destined for separate worlds. We follow Yvonne from her first forays into 1950s Dallas society, to sorority life at the University of Texas, and finally, to Paris, where she ascends the ranks of a far different social hierarchy. Meanwhile, Yvette’s spiritual inclinations and childhood trauma lead her to a lifetime of worship and service in the streets of Jericó, Colombia. Yet even as they follow disparate paths, the sisters remain bound by their shared history, continuously seeing their own choices in the eyes of the other. Through the voice of Yvonne—often wry, usually over-the-top, but always “a good Texas girl”—it’s clear that Edmund White remains, in Lorrie Moore’s words, “one of our most mischievous writers.”

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the National Book Foundation’s 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York.

Michael Schaub is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR and other publications. He is the vice president for technology of the National Book Critics Circle. A native of San Antonio, he now lives in Georgetown, Texas.