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Dope Lit Book Club
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Length
6 hours 4 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Matt Bomer & Kevin Young
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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“Oh wow, this one hurt...Rife with toxic masculinity, internalized and outward homophobia, European frankness, and American artifice, this 1950's queer romance will leave you hurting, in a claustrophobic Parisian flat, drunk, and without a cent to your name. ”
— Lambie • Underground Books
James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel with a new introduction.
Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
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Reviews
"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one."--Michael Ondaatje
"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."
--The New York Times
"Absorbing...[with] immediate emotional impact."
--The Washington Post
"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint."
--Saturday Review
"Exciting...a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction."
--The Atlantic
"Violent, excruciating beauty."
--San Francisco Chronicle Expand reviews