OUR PARIS: SKETCHES FROM MEMORY

New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 122 pages. Book-length account on subject. One of Edmund White's most beautifully conceived and realized books. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. An austerely production by Alfred A. Knopf: Small-size volume format. Red hard boards with metallic-silver titles embossed on cover and spine, as issued. Text by Edmund White. Illustrations by Hubert Sorin. In ribbed pictorial DJ, which shows one of Hubert Sorin's sketches, and titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Presents Edmund White's "Our Paris: Sketches From Memory". One of the most moving valentines for the legendary city, The Capital of The 19th Century, a major capital of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the author's first book on Paris, followed by "The Flaneur: A Stroll Through The Paradoxes of Paris" (2001) and concluded with "Inside A Pearl: My Years In Paris" (2014) . The author lived in Paris for the better part of his adult life - and at the peak of his creative powers - as an expatriate American, following in the footsteps of predecessors in Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among countless other iconic figures. The book is illustrated with witty and delightful sketches of the city by the immensely talented Hubert Sorin, an accomplished architect and artist, who was the author's lover/husband until he died of AIDS in 1994. As Edmund White revealed in subsequent interviews, this gem of a book was a collaborative act of love. He wrote about his romance and marriage (in effect, if not in legal fact) with Sorin (who left his French wife to live with White) in his masterly and elegiac novel, "The Married Man" (2000) , where the eponymous character is really two people: Hubert Sorin and Edmund White. Written in White's effortless, supple, and immaculate prose, which serves him well in this graceful celebration of life's most civilized pleasures, the greatest being Paris itself. "One of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language" (Dave Eggers) . An absolute "must-have" title for Edmund White collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Edmund White. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing (American) still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. 30 black-and-white plates. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994 for "Genet: A Biography". Anointed by Vladimir Nabokov as his American successor. One of the finest writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER EDMUND WHITE TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0679441662.