David, un giovane newyorkese in fuga da se stesso, è approdato a Parigi nel tentativo di affrancarsi dalla propria educazione, e dalla vita da ragazzo perbene che sembra essergli stata cucita addosso. Mentre la sua fidanzata, Hella, è in Spagna per riflettere sul futuro della loro storia, in un bar David conosce Giovanni, impertinente e luminoso, e ne rimane irrimediabilmente attratto. E dal loro incontro, dal primo momento in cui entra nella sua stanza, piccola e disordinata, saprà di essere perduto, che né la vergogna né la paura riusciranno a riportarlo a casa. Diviso tra Hella che incarna il desiderio di normalità, il sogno di una tranquilla vita americana, e Giovanni che invece è forza, cuore e istinto, David attraversa le strade di Parigi, vede i colori e le stagioni passare, sente passioni e bisogni taciuti riemergere e chiedere il conto. La difesa della propria identità implica sempre una lotta dolorosa, e così è anche per David, solo che la sua debolezza e la sua indecisione faranno soffrire tutti coloro che lo amano e che lui stesso ama. Come ha dichiarato lo stesso Baldwin in un'intervista del 1984: 'La stanza di Giovanni parla di quello che succede se hai paura di amare'. Prefazione di Colm Tibin.

In questo saggio autobiografico, contenuto in 'The devil finds work' (1976) James Baldwin affronta e mette in relazione i principali temi che attraversano la sua opera: il valore e l'importanza dell'eccezione, del diverso, e il suo eterno conflitto con la norma; il senso dell'essere nero nella storia e nel presente degli Stati Uniti. Prendendo spunto dai suoi iniziali incontri con il cinema (e anche con la letteratura), grazie a Orilla Miller, una coraggiosa maestra, l'autore collega con lucidità realtà e immaginario, spiegando come il secondo spesso manchi di cogliere la prima, perché assume la forma di uno specchio orientato se non proprio deformante. La voce del cinema americano è quella dei privilegiati, mentre Baldwin affida alla propria scrittura il compito di ricordare gli ultimi e gli oppressi. E come annota nella sua prefazione il giovane scrittore francese Édouard Louis 'nella cultura è compresa una violenza intrinseca', a meno che, come nelle opere di Baldwin, la si definisca in opposizione alla cultura dominante. Introduzione di Édouard Louis.

James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an  American classic. With startling realism that brings  Harlem and the black experience vividly to life,  this is a work that touches the heart with emotion  while it stimulates the mind with its narrative  style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism  in America. Moving through time from the rural  South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the  attitudes of two generations of an embattles  family,Go Tell It On The Mountain  is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught  up in a dramatic struggle and of a society  confronting inevitable change.

"The most important  novel written about the American Negro,"  says Commentary. "It is written  with poetic intensity and great narrative skill,"  writesHarper's.  Saturday Review praises it as "masterful,"  and the San Francisco Chronicle  declares that this important American novel is  "brutal, objective and compassionate."

Includes the following 23 stories:

“Wondering Jack” by James Baldwin
“The Story of the Three Goblins” by Mabel G. Taggert
“Beauty and the Beast” by Madame de Villeneuve
“The Frog Prince” by The Brothers Grimm
“Cinderella” by The Brothers Grimm
“The Velveteen Rabbit” by Margery Williams
“The Magic Fishbone” by Charles Dickens
“Thumbelina” by Hans Christian Anderson
“The Elephant’s Child” by Rudyard Kipling
“Lazy Jack” a Folktale
“The Dragon of the North” by Andrew Lang
“The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde
“King Grisly Beard” by The Brothers Grimm
“The Girl Who Owned a Bear” by Frank Stockton
“The Apple of Contentment” by Howard Pyle
“Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” by Andrew Lang
“The Magic Mirror” by Edith Howse
“Jack and the Beanstalk” an English Fairytale
“The Happy Family” by Hans Christian Anderson
“The Friendly Frog” by Charles Perrault
“A Kidnapped Santa Claus” by L. Frank Baum
“Denslow’s The Three Bears” by W. W. Denslow
“The Wonderful Toymaker” by Evelyn Sharp

Parigi, una vigilia. Un attore americano - bellissima moglie svedese, un figlio che saluta con «bonsoir» e un amico regista a cui deve il successo - sta per vivere la sua ultima serata in terra straniera. Si tratterebbe della fine di un esilio, della strada verso casa; ma non è così. Per un nero americano il momento del ritorno è sempre mancato. E stamattina stasera troppo presto, come l'ora di chi nasce espatriato. E una lunga e agitata notte di incubi. La nostalgia irrisolta di un uomo a cui hanno negato le radici. Col suo percorso biografico, negli otto blues della raccolta, James Baldwin rivive e dischiude momenti dell'intero spirito nero americano. Senza patria e senza padre nell'infanzia passata fra i vicoli e le scale antincendio di Harlem. Solo contro il peccato e la minaccia della pena di fronte ai sermoni e lo spettacolo estatico dei gospel. Disadattato e frustrato contro i pregiudizi dei razzisti, dei buonisti alla zio Tom, dei neri disillusi e abbandonati a loro stessi fra le strade e i punti esclamativi di Manhattan. Commosso sulle note di un fratello - di ogni fratello - che ha gettato la vita per inseguire Charlie Parker. Nella lotta per l'identità di una coscienza, quella nera, da sempre lacerata, la discesa fino all'inconscio appare come l'unica salvezza contro l'ossessione del colore e la paura per la propria vita. Così Baldwin si fa universale: bianco e nero, saggista e narratore, moralista e libertino. Scava nell'anima fino al peccato originale in cui è svelata, come un fuoco, la più gratuita delle brutalità dell'uomo contro il corpo dell'uomo.

Learn everything you need to know to create beautiful floral works of art in oil and acrylic!

This comprehensive book opens with a guide to essential information on the necessary tools and materials for both sketching and painting, including pencils, paints and brushes, palettes, supports, and mediums. In addition to learning about basic drawing and painting techniques and color theory, readers will learn how to create compelling compositions, achieve depth, and render realistic textures. InThe Art of Painting Flowers in Oil & Acrylic, several talented and experienced artists guide readers through easy-to-follow lessons covering a variety of floral and plant life, including tulips, dahlias, hibiscus, roses, daisies, freesia, water lilies, bird of paradise, and more. With sections devoted to both mediums, readers will learn everything they need to know to create beautiful floral works of art in oil and acrylic. Along the way, aspiring artists will discover helpful tips and tricks for mixing vibrant colors, working from photographs, working outdoors, and creating volume and dimension.

The Library of America completes its edition of the collected fiction of the literary voice of the Civil Rights era with this volume gathering three revealing later works of the 1960s and’70s. With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society raised the consciousness of American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for Black Arts Movement writers and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers, and as a result his later novels have never received the consideration given his earlier fiction. Sober in outlook but ambitious in scope, these works show Baldwin responding with his signature passion—for music, for justice, for life—and searching intelligence to the new realities of a rapidly changing cultural landscape, as the Movement era gives way to the age of identity politics that we still live in today. This culminating volume in the Library of America edition of his fiction illustrates how Baldwin continues to be relevant in twenty-first-century America, especially in his dramatizing of the unequal treatment of black men by the police and the justice system, his nuanced depictions of the black family, and his explorations of sexuality.

"This collection has a straightforward ambition: to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell’s literary works by returning their attention to his short prose." – From the Introduction

Best known for his novels and travel writing, Lawrence Durrell defied easy classification within twentieth-century modernism. His anti-authoritarian tendencies put him at odds with many contemporaries—aesthetically and politically. However, thanks to a compelling recontextualization by editor James Gifford, these 38 previously unpublished or out-of-print essays and letters reveal that Durrell’s maturation as an artist was rich, complex, and subtle. This edition promises to open up new approaches to interpreting his more famous works. Durrell fans will treasure this selection of rare nonfiction, while scholars of Durrell, Modernist literature, anti-authoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford’s fine editorial work.

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.


From the eBook edition.

Revealing the esteemed history of the world's most famous locomotive

Few locomotives are as widely known or excite so much interest as the Flying Scotsman. Designed by Sir Nigel Gresley in 1923, the locomotive became a flagship for the London and North Eastern Railway and represented them at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 and 1925. Thus began Flying Scotsman's fame, which only continued as the locomotive broke records, becoming the first to exceed 100mph in 1934 and taking the longest journey of any steam locomotive in 1988–89. Passing through such hands as Alan Pegler's and Pete Waterman's after her retirement from British Railways, Flying Scotsman is now in public hands for restoration. Here James S. Baldwin uses his expert knowledge and unrivaled collection of images to highlight the illustrious career of this world-famous locomotive.

All of the published poetry of James Baldwin, including six significant poems previously only available in a limited edition

During his lifetime, James Baldwin authored seven novels, as well as several plays and essay collections, many of which were published to widespread praise. Baldwin’s novels and essays brought him respect as a public intellectual and admiration as a writer. However, Baldwin’s earliest writing was in poetic form, and some argue that even Baldwin considered himself a poet first and foremost. One can see this inclination in the poetic rhythms of his prose. Nonetheless, his single book of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues, published only a few short years before his death in 1987, never attracted as much of the spotlight as his novels and nonfiction did and has been unavailable for many years.

This new collection celebrates Baldwin the poet. Including the nineteen poems from Jimmy’s Blues, the collection also features his poems from a limited-edition art book called Gypsy, of which only 325 copies were ever printed. Known for his relentless honesty and startlingly prophetic insights on issues of race, class, poverty, and sexual orientation, Baldwin is just as enlightening and bold in his poetry as in his famous novels and essays.

“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, 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 storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

'Mountain,' Baldwin said, 'is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.' Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, 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 storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.