James Baldwin
James Baldwin is an African American writer and civil writes activist known for his essays, novels, plays and poems. His work focuses on race in America and he is considered to be one the most important voices of the 20th century.
Giovanni's Room
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his timeDavid, 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 true nature, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. His decision eventually brings tragedy. Filled with passion, regret and longing, this story of a fated love triangle has become a landmark of gay writing. James Baldwin caused outrage as a black author writing about white homosexuals, yet for him the issues of race, sexuality and personal freedom were eternally intertwined.'Exquisite... a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring' Guardian'Excruciating beauty' San Francisco Chronicle 'Audacious... remarkable... elegant and courageous' Caryl Phillips
R 270.00
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
R 280.00
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
R 280.00
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.
R 83.00
Fire Next Time
'A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers' Barack Obama 'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice. 'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times'The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work' Guardian
R 255.00
