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Sign up todayGoing to Meet the Man
Narrator
Dion Graham
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Length
7 hours 49 minutes
Language
English
“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying—and informed throughout by Baldwin’s uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators—Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
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.
Dion Graham, from HBO’s The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. A multiple Audie Award–winning narrator and critically acclaimed actor, he has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series.
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Audiobook details
Author:
James Baldwin
Narrator:
Dion Graham
ISBN:
9781609982232
Length:
7 hours 49 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:
February 1, 2011
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#28,021 Overall
Genre rank:
#385 in Short Stories
Reviews
“Dion Graham’s reading requires him to master an array of voices: hellfire-preaching ministers, deliciously profane Harlem locals,…kittenish women. Graham ranges from tremulous exertion to sudden flashes of rage, his reading flecked by an exhaustion that creeps in at the margins of Baldwin’s prose. Baldwin’s protagonists are weary of a world that allows them no respite from racism and hatred, and Graham echoes that weariness, his voice hushed and low, its register reflecting their struggle to survive.”
“Many of these situations don’t occur in quite the same ways now, but narrator Dion Graham makes them timely and universally human…a heartbreaking performance…Graham’s reading pulls the listener back to a time when [these stories] were fresh, raw wounds.”
“Timeless in its treatment of youthful innocence, prejudice, addiction, loneliness, fear, and human suffering…Dion Graham is masterly in his rendering of the vast array of characters in these eight disparate tales. Highly recommended.”
“All of these tales have an undeniable urgency, power, and anger…Symphonic in structure, mixing religious and sexual motifs, encompassing various shades of characters and situations…memorable in every sense; funny, sad, colorful, it is a triumphant performance.”
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