My favorite Baldwin and one of the only New York novels that so well captures the simultaneous muchness of The City through vibrant, compelling characters. They live uptown and downtown and in every borough. They are out late until it's early and then they are out early. They hustle and halt and fail and fuck it all. They surprise themselves and the reader, are tender, are angry, are knit together through the end and so on and on. These characters will never leave you.
— Landon
Description
From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century—a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. • “Brilliant and fiercely told.” —The New York Times
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
About the Author
James Baldwin was born in 1924 and educated in New York. The author of over twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, Baldwin received numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Grant. In 1986 he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. He died in 1987.
Praise For…
"An almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience" —The Washington Post
"Brilliantly and fiercely told." —The New York Times
