"Colm Tóibín's personal account of encountering James Baldwin's work, published in Baldwin's centenary year. Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired...

"An exploration into the continued relevance of James Baldwin's writings and wisdom"--

"Written on the twentieth anniversary of James Baldwin's death, Letter to Jimmy is African writer Alain Mabanckou's ode to his literary hero and an effort to place Baldwin's life in context within the greater African diaspora. Beginning with a chance encounter with a beggar wandering along a Santa Monica beach-a man whose ragged clothes and unsteady gait remind the author of a character out of one of James Baldwin's novels- Mabanckou uses his own...

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971-87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed "Chez Baldwin." In this volume, the author employs Baldwin's home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. The author shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality...

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise?, Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R & B. Based on unprecendented access to private...