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If Beale Street Could Talk

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780141963792

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • RRP: £11.99

If Beale Street Could Talk

The inspiration for the film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins

'Achingly beautiful' Guardian

Harlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves - her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child - has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough?

'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' Vanity Fair

'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

  • ISBN: 9780141963792

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • RRP: £11.99

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About the Author

James Baldwin

Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, social critic, and the author of more than twenty books. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collection The Fire Next Time was a bestseller that made him an influential figure in the civil rights movement. Baldwin spent many years in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in 1987.

James Baldwin

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Extracts

Colm Tóibín on Baldwin’s confessional Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is a mainstay on lists of LGBTQ classics. In this introduction from the new Everyman edition, Colm Tóibín unravels the intimately confessional style that draws this beautiful book into so many readers’ hearts

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