James Baldwin
3 Paris Readers Circle members will win a copy
A box set of James Baldwin's principal novels, featuring Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood. With lyrical precision and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.
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. One of the first novels to openly explore the theme of homosexuality, it paved the way for generations of gay and lesbian novelists.
James Baldwin
"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." --The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." --Boston Globe
James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon--Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen--he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference.
James Baldwin addresses racism in America on a 1968 episode of THE DICK CAVETT SHOW. Not to sound oxymoronic but if you are too young to have watched the program it was an "INTELLIGENT TALK SHOW.")
James Baldwin at the National Portrait Gallery
Coming July 12, 2024 - April 20, 2025
The exhibition will rely on portraiture and ephemera to explore the interwoven lives of Baldwin; Lorraine Hansberry, author of “A Raisin in the Sun”; lawyer, educator and politician Barbara Jordan; activist Bayard Rustin; and Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, both poets and filmmakers. Well-known portraits by Beauford Delaney and Bernard Gotfryd will be shown alongside works by artists such as Richard Avedon, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson and Jack Whitten. Viewing Baldwin in the context of his community will reveal how his sexuality, faith, artistic curiosities and notions of masculinity—coupled with his involvement in the civil rights movement—helped define his writing and long-lasting legacy.
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Readers Comment
Just the book I couldn’t wait to read!
And now I am thanks to my American friend in Paris and The Paris Readers Circle. Can’t wait to get to chapter 10, Geraldine’s Street of Shops-inside my favorite store, Henri Bendel on West 57th Street.
Thank you so much Terrance !
Spending a beautiful weekend reading!!
Btw there was a fashion jewelry shop on the Street of Shops. I was drooling over the center glass case about
3 1/2 feet high and had a question for the female sales associate. She answered my question and we started to chat. She was friendly and we eventually exchanged names.
First and last. When she told me her full name, with the last name of Mailer, I had to ask.
Yes, she was a former wife of Norman.
No she did not show me the scar, but she rather happily admitted to being the wife he stabbed in the stomach.
Merci
Amy Krakow
Brooklyn NY, Philadelphia PA, NY NY, Semur-en Auxois, Côte d’Or Bourgogne, and now Fort Lee, NJ
Café Terrance at La Coupole
an informal gathering of anglophonic francophiles
Next Gathering June 23
10:30AM-12PM
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A Paris tradition-Jim Bitterman, CNN
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