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

If Beale Street Could Talk

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Paperback
29 Sep 1994
EBook
29 Sep 1994
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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
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About the author

James Baldwin

Born in 1924 in New York City, James Baldwin published the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, going on to garner acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality and humanity.
Other novels included Giovanni's Room, Another Country and Just Above My Head as well as essay works like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. Having lived in France, he died on December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul de Vence.

portrait photo of James Baldwin

Also by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room
Encounter on the Seine
The Harlem Ghetto
No Name in the Street
The James Baldwin Collection
Everybody's Protest Novel
Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems
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