Freedom: A Word George W. Bush Cant Spell
Explore a provocative book list on the theme of freedom, featuring Milan Kundera's *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* and Edmund White's queer classics. From Henry Miller's *Tropic of Cancer* to essential fiction on liberation, this curated collection examines the many meanings of being free.
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
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A Boy's Own Story
by Edmund White
At home, in school, and on the streets, a homosexual teenager growing up in the 1950s moves through comic sexual experiments, isolation, fear, and exciting expectations toward an escape from childhood and a firm sense of self, in this classic coming-of-age novel. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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The Beautiful Room Is Empty
by Edmund White
When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age. "With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World
