Skinned alive

From the cover flap: With his most recent novel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, the highly acclaimed continuation of his ground-breaking work A Boys Own Story, Edmund White was confirmed as one of our most eloquent novelists and our most influential chronicler of gay life. Now this dazzling collection of stories—his first book of fiction in seven years—establishes him as a master of the shorter form as well. Set in Europe and America, these eight stories (many of them autobiographical) explore the ways we make sense of personal experience: the workings of desire, in youth and later in life; the…