The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmond White. The prequel to this book is already in the collection, so I thought there would be interest in this one. I've done all the usual prep work and it should be an easy validation. As usual, if anything needs rescanning or you have questions about any part of this book, send me a note and I'll check it out. I never get rid of books until I get the note from BS that they've been added to the collection. Here's the synopsis: White returns to the spellbinding world of his earlier novel as his young narrator-a sexually obsessed, timidly conventional boy-emerges from the tragicomedy of his adolescence and makes his way, in startling leaps, toward the tentative confidence of early adulthood. In a narrative that mirrors the insistent rhythm and emotional range of this nameless young man's life, we follow him-from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, from the morally constrained 1950s to the "liberated" 1960s-as he struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality, with his "self and its discontent, isolation, self-hatred, and burning ambition." Scenes of sexual intensity are played off against intellectual debates, family struggles, and passionate if confused explorations of friendship. College and career, literature and art, the oppression of psychoanalysis and the birth of gay liberation-these are some of the themes and conflicts fixed by this relentlessly paced and poetically imagined novel. Edmund White, whose previous books have been praised by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal, has never written with such urgency, such humor, such candor before. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, which further reveals the convulsions of feeling, belief, and politics that shaped his complex, passionate, and singular hero, should confirm his place in American letters. Enjoy, Donna