Another Country

author
James Baldwin

the spiel
I have a friend who a reads Another Country every year, and I can totally see why.  This is one of those rare books that contains worlds, and with each reading offers up something different to the reader.

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country centers around six people who are all, in some way, connected to Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer in New York City.  We follow Baldwin’s cast of characters into and out of the crack and crevasses of their lives, and we are privy to things that we should never see and won’t easily forget.  Another Country is haunting as hell, the images sear themselves onto your mind.

Thematically, it touches on pretty much everything: race, sexuality, gender, class, passion, love, loss, grief, friendship.  You name it, it’s in here.  It’s a book about how we hurt and need each other in equal measure; the ways in which we entwine ourselves into the lives, and the bodies of the people we love.  The things we pay for, and how we pay.  The Washington Post dubbed this book, “An almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience.”  And, really, that sums it up perfectly.

Baldwin’s work in general is fabulous—absolutely indispensable—but Another Country outshines the rest of his stunning oeuvre.  Or, as Langston Hughes put it, 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 the thought.”

other people who liked this book (or at least say they did)
Pretty much everyone; I mean, Langston Hughes blurbed it, for fuck's sake.

some other things this author has written
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Notes of a Native Son
Giovanni's Room
The Fire Next Time
Nobody Knows My Name
If Beale Street Could Talk