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James Baldwin Reading from Giovanni’s Room: From Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 1 Audiobook
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Giovanni's Room, Baldwin's second novel, deals frankly with homosexuality in a manner daring for its time. It depicts a white American struggling to accept his homoerotic desires. David, the protagonist, like Baldwin himself, feels alienated from his native country and moves to Paris in search of a freer life. In the passage Baldwin reads on this recording, David recalls a childhood sexual encounter with another boy—an encounter that left him deeply upset and ambivalent about his manhood.
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“[Baldwin] is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing, and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise, and take a bow in disappearing…the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.”
— Langston Hughes
Quotes
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“If Van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our twentieth-century one.”
— Michael Ondaatje, New York Times bestselling author -
“[Baldwin] has become one of the few writers of our time.”
— Norman Mailer, New York Times bestselling author -
“A young American involved with both a woman and a man…Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.”
— New York Times -
“Exciting…a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.”
— Atlantic -
“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.”
— Saturday Review
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About James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924–1987), acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, was educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, received excellent reviews and was immediately recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans’ refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time. The next year, he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. His other collaborations include A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead and A Dialogue with the poet–activist Nikki Giovanni. He also adapted Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost. He was made a commander of the French Legion of Honor a year before his death, one honor among many he achieved in his life.