No Name in the Street
No Name in the Street
James Baldwin
Penguin Books
2024
9780241711187Paperback
20 x 13 x 1 cm
160 pages
In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose.
Timeless, tender and profound, Baldwin’s searing narrative contains the multiplicities of what it means to be Black in America and, indeed, around the world.
Praise:
"In the centenary year of Baldwin’s birth, the clarity, fire and empathetic humanity of his voice is needed now more than ever" - Colin Grant, Guardian
"He was one of our best essayists in the best American gadfly tradition" - Ralph Ellison
"What makes his essays so compelling is that he insists on being personal, on forcing the public and the political to submit to his voice and the test of his experience and his observation" - Colm Tóibín
"If Van Gogh was our 19th century artist-saint then James Baldwin is our 20th century one" - Michael Ondaatje
"Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you" - Ta-Nehisi Coates