Baldwin's iconic novel explores desire, love, and identity in 1950s Paris. James Baldwin draws on his own Parisian experiences and travels and constructs the most beautiful sentences. The story follows David, a young American in Paris whose girlfriend just left him. Following her absence, he explores his own sexuality and grapples with modern masculinity, social expectations, and guilt. There's so much to unpack in such a short classic.

While reading this, I kept having to check and recheck myself to make sure this really was published in the 1960s. It's tragically timely. I was utterly stopped in my tracks to read this line: "It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck...” This book is slim, but don't let its length fool you. Its heft comes when you find yourself still thinking of it days and months later. Why this would be great for book clubs: If your book club isn't one to shy away from hard discussions, there's plenty to talk about here. First published in 1963, there is so much to break down about concerning what progress has been made when it comes to civil rights, and sadly, how much is still the same.

From the publisher: "In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness 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 retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face."

Baldwin was the son of a preacher and the grandson of an enslaved person, and his life experiences heavily inform this semi-autobiographical 1953 novel, which tells the story of one day in the life of a 14-year-old boy in Harlem in the late 1930s. The boy, John Grimes, struggles with hypocrisy in the Pentecostal church while also finding comfort in the community. Baldwin powerfully writes about John's spiritual and sexual awakening as a young, gay Black man and a person of faith.

From the publisher: "I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.' One of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way."