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Audiobooks Narrated by James Baldwin
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James Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist.
His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western society, most notably in regard to the mid-twentieth-century United States.
This is a collection of his speeches and lectures.
Giovanni's Room, Baldwin's second novel, deals frankly with homosexuality in a manner daring for its time. It depicts a white American struggling to accept his homoerotic desires. David, the protagonist, like Baldwin himself, feels alienated from his native country and moves to Paris in search of a freer life. In the passage Baldwin reads on this recording, David recalls a childhood sexual encounter with another boy-an encounter that left him deeply upset and ambivalent about his manhood.
New York's Greenwich Village in the 1950s, the gathering place of artists, writers, and musicians, is the setting of Another Country, Baldwin's third novel. The characters, all involved in complex interracial relationships, cluster around Rufus, a jazz musician whose suicide affects them profoundly. For Baldwin, Rufus represents "the black corpse floating in the national psyche." Baldwin's first reading on this recording portrays Rufus' state of mind in his final moments.
Baldwin's second reading is a sermon by Reverend Foster, addressing Rufus' friends and family at his funeral. In his adolescence Baldwin himself was a Pentecostal preacher, following in his stepfather's footsteps. After a few years he abandoned his faith, but the sonorous sentences and exhortations of black religious oratory continued to inform his writing. This sermon is an electrifying example of that oratory applied to the subject of racial struggle.
Volume 1 contains readings by James Baldwin from Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, exploring the dilemmas of being black and gay in mid-twentieth century America. Willliam Styron reads about a disabled child finding brief moments of joy in Lie Down in Darkness, his novel about a troubled Southern family. James Jones reads the most famous passage from his celebrated World War II novel, From Here to Eternity. And Philip Roth does a hilarious comic turn in a bizarre scene from his early novel, Letting Go.
In the first passage a group of artists, writers and musicians mingle in the heady atmosphere of New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950’s. James Baldwin reads with passion about the suicide of a young black man in despair. The second passage from Another Country takes place at the funeral service, where Baldwin speaks with both anger and eloquence, in the voice of the minister attempting to comfort his friends and family.
***This title is presented as an excerpt***
James Baldwin gives an electrifying reading about a young American in Paris recalling a dramatic and transforming incident from his boyhood, as he struggles to accept his sexual identity.
***This title is presented as an excerpt***
