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Giovanni's Room
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.
David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night--"the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Book Details
- Publisher: Vintage
- Publish Date: Sep 12nd, 2013
- Pages: 176
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.80in - 5.10in - 0.60in - 0.40lb
- EAN: 9780345806567
- Categories: • Classics• LGBTQ+ - Gay• Literary
More books to explore
About the Author
More books by James Baldwin
What people are saying
"I waited years to read this book, resisting it, feeling sure that any book about queerness published in 1965 would strike me as antiquated, hoary and no longer relevant. How wrong I was."
Charles McNulty is the theater critic for the Los Angeles Times.
I read plenty of new fiction this year, but these books made the biggest impression on me: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Persuasion, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Philip Roth's Patrimony, Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means.
Poet, Writer, High School Teacher! | In This Quiet Church of Night I Say Amen (@CCMPress) | Work in @Longreads, @guardian, @LitHub, more | he/him
On James Baldwin’s birthday, a few favorite sentences from Giovanni’s Room, a perfect novel — “the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” https://t.co/1D2QlgAHDM
Praise for this book
"A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity." --The New York Times
"Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact." --The Washington Post
"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint." --Saturday Review
"Exciting ... a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction." --The Atlantic
"Violent, excruciating beauty." --San Francisco Chronicle
"To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man --to be forced to understand so much." --Alfred Kazin
"This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." --Saturday Review
"He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being --which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer." --The Nation
"He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought." --Langston Hughes
"He has become one of the few writers of our time." --Norman Mailer
What people are saying
"I waited years to read this book, resisting it, feeling sure that any book about queerness published in 1965 would strike me as antiquated, hoary and no longer relevant. How wrong I was."
Charles McNulty is the theater critic for the Los Angeles Times.
I read plenty of new fiction this year, but these books made the biggest impression on me: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Persuasion, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Philip Roth's Patrimony, Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means.