Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 29/09/1994
ISBN: 9780140187977
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 11mm x 129mm
Weight: 145g
RRP: £8.99
The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins
'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
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 29/09/1994
ISBN: 9780140187977
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 11mm x 129mm
Weight: 145g
RRP: £8.99
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
Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing
The spirit of Jimmy's work is of a high moral prophetic vision
One of the few essential novelists of our time