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Penguin books that reshaped love and relationships, with insight from Paloma Faith.

Features

The Penguin books that redefined love and relationships

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‘His true genius lies in the universality of his observations’: Reflections on James Baldwin’s legacy

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Reading lists

Where to start reading James Baldwin’s books

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12 James Baldwin quotes that are still painfully true today

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Extracts

An extract from James Baldwin’s classic essay ‘Many Thousands Gone”

Artfile – For Colouring

The ultimate Black History Month reading list

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20 books everyone should read before they’re 20

The best short stories ever written

Ignore a book's dedication at your peril.

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10 of the most intriguing book dedications in fiction

From William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch to Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, the 1950s were a fascinating time for literature.

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Books that shaped the 1950s

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Books they tried to ban

Colm Tóibín on Baldwin’s confessional Giovanni’s Room

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Giovanni's Room

Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his time 
 'Audacious... remarkable... elegant and courageous' Caryl Phillips 
David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying who he is, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. It is a decision that will bring tragedy. 
 
'Exquisite, a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring' Guardian 
 
'Gorgeous, fearless, tempered by dark knowledge and pain ... the greatest American prose stylist of his generation' Colm Tóibín 
 
'A layered exploration of queer desire ... It is electric' Hilton Als

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). 
 
James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France

David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying his sexuality, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man — a decision that will bring tragedy, longing and regret.

The Fire Next Time

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’ 
 
Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.

‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’ 
 
Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.

The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work

The Fire Next Time is the finest essay I’ve ever read.

Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose.

In The Devil Finds Work he has taken the old subject of race and made it even more personal, probing perhaps more deeply than ever before into American racial practices

James Baldwin (Author) 
JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual - James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time—which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

No Name in the Street

'Candid, insightful, moving . . . a memoir, a chronicle of and commentary on America's abortive civil-rights movement' -The New York Times 
 In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose. 
 Timeless, tender and profound, Baldwin’s searing narrative contains the multiplicities of what it means to be Black in America and, indeed, around the world.

Baldwin’s essayistic reflections are often marked by the personal: he uses anecdotes from his own life to uncover more universal truths . . . the clarity, fire and empathetic humanity of his voice is needed now more than ever

A strikingly personal book… an assessment of where the traumatic events of the late-1960s left Americans, both white and black… Baldwin’s prose style is as striking in No Name in the Street as in many of his other essays… [his] words still burn on the page

There is still pleasure in his inimitable voice. That voice was heard aloud in the debates and interviews he gave which made Baldwin a great example of that extinct species, the public intellectual

It contains truth that cannot be denied

If Van Gogh was our 19th century artist-saint then James Baldwin is our 20th century one

Mesmerizing... as candid, insightful and moving as any in his previous essays... His message is finally as basic as it is undeniable: If we do not love one another, we will destroy one another

Baldwin wrote in arias of feeling and thought… [He] proved that if he wrote it down, it could have power beyond the moment

He was one of our best essayists in the best American gadfly tradition

What makes his essays so compelling is that he insists on being personal, on forcing the public and the political to submit to his voice and the test of his experience and his observation

Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin&rsquo;s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). 
 
James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France

Going To Meet The Man

The Rockpile; The Outing; The Man Child; Previous Condition; Sonny's Blues

‘Everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies’ 
 
In these eight extraordinary stories of love, conflict, desperation and fear, James Baldwin shows people trapped by the roles they must play in society, and those who try and escape them. 
 
From the child in ‘The Rockpile’ whose God-fearing father will not forgive his illegitimacy, to the adolescent who hides his sexuality from his community in ‘The Outing’, and from the down-and-out jazz pianist recovering from addiction in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to the chilling initiation of a racist in ‘Going to Meet the Man’, these tales, first published in 1965, explore the subtle and profound wounds that discrimination leaves – both in its victims and its perpetrators. 
‘He uses words as the sea uses waves’ Langston Hughes 
'Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion' Guardian

The best of the stories are equal to the novels: try the title story, about the radicalisation of a white boy at a lynching, or the exceptional Sonny’s Blues, where a man copes with his brother’s addiction to heroin

His prose emits a long piercing scream as it takes off from the page like a fighter jet on a mission to drop a payload of explosive truths across enemy territory, flying fast and low, risking hostile and friendly fire

The stories carry Baldwin’s depth of sympathy . . . Only a reader with a heart of stone will fail to be moved to tears of recognition, sorrow and joy when ['Sonny's Blues'] reaches its conclusion

Baldwin refused to hold anyone&rsquo;s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). 
 
James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France

‘There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.’The eight stories in this collection showcase the breadth of Baldwin’s imagination, empathy and social critique as he explores the subtle and profound wounds that discrimination leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators: from the down-and-out jazz pianist recovering from addiction in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to the adolescent who hides his burgeoning sexuality from the church community that defines his world in ‘The Outing’ to the horrifying story of the initiation of a racist, as a deputy sheriff remembers his parents taking him to see the mutilation and murder of a black man by a gleeful mob in 'Going to Meet the Man'.First published in 1965, these tales of ingenuity, desperation, power and fear provide a snapshot of a writer at the height of his literary powers.

More Notes Of A Native Son

Nobody Knows My Name

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent 
 
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 
 
'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 
 
'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

In this tender, impassioned fourth novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself. 
 
'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it' 
 
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that seems poised on the brink of racial war. In this tender, angry 1968 novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself. 
 
'The emotion surrounding family attachment... is deeply felt and is one reasons he continues to be read with such intensity' Colm Tóibín

Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing

The emotion surrounding family attachment... is deeply felt and is one of the reasons he continues to be read with such intensity

A jazzlike reconfiguration of Baldwin's own life, with existing parts examined and rearranged and new parts added

One of the few essential novelists of our time

'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it' 
 
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that seems poised on the brink of racial war. In this tender, angry 1968 novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.

Dark Days

'So the club rose, the blood came down, and his bitterness and his anguish and his guilt were compounded' 
 
Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays - Dark Days, The Price of the Ticket and The White Man's Guilt - blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Notes of a Native Son

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story' 
 
James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom. 
 
'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post 
 
'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian 
 
'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Opens with a knock-out punch . . . the command of an audience and the rhetorical flourishes . . . are everywhere in his writing, but particularly in his essays, which contain a mix of registers from an intimate conversational tone to speechifying oratory

A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all who ponder on the things books say

Powerful . . . I wish I could press this book into the hands of every American - actually, every human.

Edgy and provocative . . . entertainingly satirical

A classic . . . Take the words out of the 1950s, when they were published, and they could apply to the women in pink hats, the scientists, the Black Lives Matter activists, the climate-change believers and the LGBTQ-rights supporters who have flooded the streets of Washington this year

A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew

Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest

I Am Not Your Negro

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film 
 
In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 
 
'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 
 
'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety 
 
 'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian 
 
 'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

Lets James Baldwin's searing work soar . . . you will be astounded by the brilliance of his polemic

A striking work of storytelling . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made . . . This might be the only movie about race relations that adequately explains with sympathy the root causes

Thrilling. . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, devastated my universe

Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence

I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet

Go Tell It on the Mountain

The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition.

Something in his prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence.

It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down, unable to fully articulate my own response towards it ... [A] notion of a shared humanity consumed Baldwin, and infused everything he did and wrote. Deprived of heritage and history, he borrowed freely and created his own unique language, with the cadences of the Bible and of jazz and Negro spirituals, and inflections of James, Dickens and Shakespeare ... This should, like J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, have been crowned as the Great American Novel.

A distinctive book, both realistic and brutal ... A novel of extraordinary poetry.

Born in 1924 in New York City, James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, going on to garner acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity. 
Other novels included Giovanni's Room, Another Country and Just Above My Head as well as essay works like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. Having lived in France, he died on December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul de Vence.

'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.' 
 
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual and moral struggle towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

The groundbreaking novel by one of the most important twentieth-century American writers, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition.

Audacious ... remarkable ... elegant and courageous

A powerful book because of the stark simplicity of its drama and the intensity of its vision

Exquisite ... a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' 
 
Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Go Tell it on the Mountain

James Baldwin's electrifying first novel. 
 
'I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.' 
 
Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind. 
 
'His prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence' Douglas Field, Guardian 
 
'A beautiful, enduring, spirtual song of a novel' Andrew O'Hagan

Like many debuts, it’s autobiographical, which may explain why Baldwin was so good at rendering a child’s thoughts with adult intelligence, but without losing their raw power — right up to the chilling, Orwellian ending

It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down... It captures an essential aspect of life in America, its contradictions and seductions, that bittersweet mix of love and hate that so many feel towards the country

His prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence

Vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details

A beautiful, enduring, spiritual song of a novel

Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin had an early career as a teenage preacher. He lived in Paris from 1948-1956 and his first novels, the autobiographical GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and GIOVANNI'S ROOM established him as a promising novelist and anticipated some of the themes of his later works, such as racism and sexuality. He became a prominent spokesperson for racial equality, especially during the civil rights movement. He lived in France during his last years. Baldwin died in 1987.

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in 1953, Baldwin's first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

Another Country

'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton Post 
 
When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit. 
 
'In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century' Colm Tóibín

A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience

Baldwin is one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers

A delicate and fine-tuned talent... The book reveals Baldwin's immense will and professionalism

Let our novelists read Mr Baldwin and tremble. There is a whirlwind loose in the land

In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century

Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin had an early career as a teenage preacher. He lived in Paris from 1948-1956 and his first novels, the autobiographical GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and GIOVANNI'S ROOM established him as a promising novelist and anticipated some of the themes of his later works, such as racism and sexuality.  He became a prominent spokesperson for racial equality, especially during the civil rights movement. He lived in France during his last years. Baldwin died in 1987.

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s.  Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

Just Above My Head

'This is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers' Edmund White, Washington Post 
 
 When Arthur Montana, world-renowned 'Emperor of Soul', is found dead in a London pub, his grief-stricken brother looks back over thirty years in the lives of their group of friends: from their childhood spent preaching and singing in Harlem churches, to their struggles with war and poverty, and their encounters with wealth, love and fame. 
 
 Set against a vividly drawn background of the civil rights movement of the sixties, Baldwin's last novel is a monumental saga that ranges from New York to Paris, Korea to Africa to portray how profoundly racial politics can shape life, especially in the private business of love. 
 
 'Warm, melancholy . . . Hall Montana's voice is the conduit for Baldwin's most distinctive quality as a writer, his abundant tenderness' The New York Times

The best of his work ... stands comparison with any of its period to come out of the United States

This is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers

If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one

Baldwin is one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers

This is the fictional story of the great gospel singer Arthur Montana. Arthur was found dead in the basement of a London pub at the age of thirty-nine, yet he lies on in this memoir. Written by Hall, his brother and manager, it is in part a subtle and moving study of the treacherous ebb and flow of memory. 
 
Set against a vividly drawn background of the civil rights movement of the sixties, Just Above My Head explores how Arthur discovers his love for Jimmy - 'with his smile like a lantern and a voice like Saturday nights' - and portrays how profoundly racial politics can shape the private business of love.

If Beale Street Could Talk

'Achingly beautiful' Guardian 
 
Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power. 
 
'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates 
 
The inspiration for Oscar award-winning film

If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family

Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten "the black experience" into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life-but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes

The spirit of Jimmy's work is of a high moral prophetic vision

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

James Baldwin

Caryl Phillips

Extraordinarily exact and complex emotional intimacy . . . At the core of the novel lies Baldwin’s recognition that with a denial of suffering and pain as a means of happiness, there can be no feeling, understanding, or real connection in life

Today, when a great many arguments and complaints from the queer quarters of the political sphere have to do with what has been done to queerness by the patriarchy and by whiteness, Baldwin asks, in Giovanni&rsquo;s Room, what love looks like, ultimately, when we leave all those bags at the door &mdash; and if we can. Do we know how to live in a purely queer world not defined by resistance or self-hatred?&rsquo;

The whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do.

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