Giovanni's Room (Deluxe Edition): A Novel

by James Baldwin, Kevin Young (Introduction)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One of Baldwin's best known novels, often the first that readers discover; a classic of gay literature.

A deluxe edition of James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel, with a new introduction by Kevin Young and special cover art designed by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593688960
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

August 2, 1924

Date of Death:

December 1, 1987

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

St. Paul de Vence, France

Education:

DeWitt Clinton High School, New York City

Editorial Reviews

In a tone equal parts naïve and urbane, Matt Bomer brings an authentic and absolutely American middle-class voice to James Baldwin's 1956 bestseller. The story, controversial at the time, is about a white New Yorker living in Paris who has a fiery and ultimately tragic love affair with a young, gay Italian bartender while his fiancée is on holiday in Spain. In his fine introduction poet Kevin Young places GIOVANNI'S ROOM in the top tier of classic twentieth-century and LGBTQ+ (called "strange" in the 1950s) literature. But it's Bomer's even, sometimes melancholy delivery that takes listeners on a journey into closeted gay life, the search for what it is to be a man, and, chiefly, what it is to be in love. Here, nobody makes it out unscathed. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2024 - AudioFile