Giovanni's Room

Product Description

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.

Review

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.-- "New York Times"

Absorbing...[with] immediate emotional impact.-- "Washington Post"

Exciting...A book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.-- "Atlantic"

Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.-- "Saturday Review"

Narrator Dan Butler captures the brooding nature of the main character, David, who is trapped in a coming-of-age crisis...Butler's rich baritone carries the lilt and rhythmic pacing of the dense, poetic prose that made James Baldwin famous. A novel with as much interior monologue as dialogue can be challenging to hold the listener's interest. Butler surmounts this difficulty by differentiating between David's inner thoughts and his complex outer world through variations in pace, pitch, and tone.-- "AudioFile"

Violent, excruciating beauty.-- "San Francisco Chronicle"

About the Author

James Baldwin (1924-1987), acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, was educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, received excellent reviews and was immediately recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time. The next year, he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. His other collaborations include A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead and A Dialogue with the poet-activist Nikki Giovanni. He also adapted Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost. He was made a commander of the French Legion of Honor a year before his death, one honor among many he achieved in his life.

Dan Butler, audiobook narrator, actor, writer, director, and producer, has had major roles on and off Broadway and has appeared in numerous television shows, including Frasier, House, and Monk. He cowrote and directed Karl Rove, I Love You and has appeared in such feature films as Crazy, Stupid, Love; Silence of the Lambs; Enemy of the State; and Fixing Frank, among others.