OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections are chosen by group members and highlight a mix of new LGBTQ+ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month in The Learning Center at the Palm Springs Public Library. The book discussion starts at 6:30 p.m. (from 6:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. is a social mixer). For more information, please email Book Club Coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting.

View other selections for the OutBook Book Club.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

December 6, 2023

A Previous Life by Edmund White

—A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.

Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they’ve written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he’s had with men and women across his lifetime―most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.

Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White’s new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White’s earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode―one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character―White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.

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