Going to Meet the Man
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A major collection of short stories by one of America’s most important writers—informed by the knowledge the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators. • “If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winner of The English Patient
In this modern classic, "there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water.
It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As might be expected for this collection of short stories, Dion Graham's reading requires him to master an array of voices: hellfire-preaching ministers, deliciously profane Harlem locals, to kittenish women. Graham ranges from tremulous exertion to sudden flashes of rage, his reading flecked by an exhaustion that creeps in at the margins of Baldwin's prose. Baldwin's protagonists are weary of a world that allows them no respite from racism and hatred, and Graham echoes that weariness, his voice hushed and low, its register reflecting their struggle to survive.