James Baldwin

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is a slim, devastating novel about a young American man in 1950s Paris who falls for a bartender and then can't bear what that love asks of him. It's literary fiction at its most precise and emotionally exposed, and one of those books whose reputation has only deepened with time.

Two short essays, white-hot and unforgettable, in which James Baldwin tells America the truth about race, faith, and itself. Barely a hundred pages long, it carries more force than libraries of bigger books and has lost none of its prophetic charge.