If Beale Street Could Talk
Play sample
  • Published: 29 September 1994
  • ISBN: 9780140187977
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

If Beale Street Could Talk

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 Sep 1994
EBook
29 Sep 1994
Audiobook
4 Apr 2024
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.
  • Published: 29 September 1994
  • ISBN: 9780140187977
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Also by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room
Dark Days
The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name ; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work
Notes of a Native Son
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Another Country
See all

Praise for If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family

Joyce Carol Oates

Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten "the black experience" into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life-but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes

Vanity Fair

Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing

Cornel West

The spirit of Jimmy's work is of a high moral prophetic vision

Amriri Baraka

One of the few essential novelists of our time

New Statesman
penguin pop image
penguin pop image