From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century—a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. • “Brilliant and fiercely told.” —The New York Times

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

A groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love—”a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).

In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.  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.

One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (Chicago Sun-Times).

Baldwin’s classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate

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

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.

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned.

A major work of American literature from a major American writer that powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.

At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty.

From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume.

“An absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s time—and of him.”

—The New York Review of Books

Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity.

From “the best essayist in this country” (The New York Times Book Review) comes an incisive book-length essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumptions in many of the films that have shaped our consciousness.

Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained and shaped us.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movementin the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. • “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle … all presented in searing, brilliant prose,”

A collection of “passionate, probing, controversial” essays (The Atlantic) on topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society.

Told with Baldwin’s characteristically unflinching honesty, this “splendid book” (The New York Times) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays along with personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, and other writers.

“James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human.

—The New York Times

An extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism.

In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details.

The Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

A masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and Black women and Black fathers and Black sons.

"What style! What intensity! What religious feeling!.... The man has mastered his rage and bitterness. He's a marvel!" —John Cheever

In his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers.

An award-winning play from one of America’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till.

“A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat.” —The New York Times

James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion. 

A rare, lucidly composed screenplay from one of America’s greatest writers, based on the bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“Sharp…. Precise…. There is no questioning the depth and sincerity of Baldwin’s admiration for Malcolm X.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Baldwin breathes cinematic life into this controversial and important figure, offering a new look at a man who changed himself in order to change the country.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.

“Thrilling…. A portrait of one man’s confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, ‘devastated my universe.’”

—The New York Times

The best of the best from a powerful voice in the American literary landscape who fearlessly tackled race, sex, politics, and art in his internationally acclaimed novels, short stories, plays, and essays.

“[Baldwin] 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

James Baldwin was and remains a powerfully prophetic voice in the American literary landscape.

The action of this short novel spans a single day in John’s life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his family’s troubled past and his own inchoate longings for the future, set against a shining vision of a city where he both does and does not belong.

Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, 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 sharp, probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.