James Baldwin

From "the best essayist in this country” (The New York Times Book Review) comes an incisive book-length essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumptions in many of the films that have shaped our consciousness.

In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

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.….

James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic...

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...

The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today.

From one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century—an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism.

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem....

James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer's 10-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south....

An essential compendium of James Baldwin’s most powerful nonfiction work, calling on us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.” Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did...

James Baldwin's timeless, bestselling novel of love and solidarity in the face of injustice—the beloved classic that inspired the major motion picture directed by Barry Jenkins.

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin's most influential work! Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his 20s, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil...

“Quixotic” is a word that the dictionary defines as “extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary…” and that is a fitting definition, indeed, for this charming retelling of Don Quixote, the 17th century Spanish classic by Miguel de Cervantes, now updated for the modern reader. The...

A major collection of short fiction—including the story "Sonny's Blues"—by one of America’s most important writers, exploring the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators.

A major work of American literature from a major American writer that powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. "Baldwin is one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." —Saturday Review At the height of...

James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers. Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep...

James Baldwin gives an electrifying reading about a young gay American in Paris recalling a dramatic and transforming incident from his boyhood, as he struggles to accept his sexual identity....

"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....

From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as...