If Beale Street Could Talk - Softcover

Baldwin, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140187979 ISBN 13: 9780140187977

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1994

Synopsis

''Achingly beautiful'' Guardian

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.

''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

The inspiration for Oscar award-winning film

About this title

From the Publisher

Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realisitic tale... a powerful endictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time.

From the Back Cover

"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one."
--Michael Ondaatje

"A major work of black American fiction... His best novel yet, even Baldwin's most devoted readers are due to be stunned by it."
--The New Republic

"Emotional dynamite... a powerful assault upon the cynicism that seems today to drain our determination to confront deep social problems."
--Library Journal

"A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless."
--The New York Times Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140187979
• ISBN 13: 9780140187977
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192