Collected Essays

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Collected Essays

James Baldwin

Essays

Jul 27, 2018

It can be a little too easy to pin labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote specifically of his time and place—America in the middle of the twentieth century—and engaged its most dangerous themes—race, Civil Rights, the persisting degradations of history—does not limit the reach of his sentences into the past and the future: They are, and will remain, acute inquiries into the moral and political quandaries of our being, regardless of the age in which they’re read. His essays especially are provocative exercises for the reader; they move with restlessness and agility and, now as then, they offer his readers not solace but a kind of education in sorrow, teaching us that morality is far more fatal, and perhaps more unforgiving, than our sentimental narratives of reconciliation and redemption allow us to believe.

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Dan Cooper

Mar 21, 2020

I wasn't wild about it because it seemed outdated in two ways. First I hope we're further along than to have any doubts about what he had to say, he seemed to do very important work for a much earlier stage of awareness. I'm sure the first book about the dangers of polluting rivers was super important at the moment but wouldn't teach us anything now. Also the language seems from a time black authors saw value in emulating crazy-scholarly white speak in order to be taken seriously. The problems with this are first of all that it's demeaning for any author to have to hide, authors like Kiese Laymon are so much more powerful now as themselves. But also it's just achingly overdone and wordy and boring. In Words of a Native Son Baldwin states the difference between writing a book and a play are that speeches don't work in plays and to write a play he has to cut cut cut and use one word instead of many. Um you're half right, but that's not a difference, the same thing needed to be done to the essays as well.

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Liam Casavan

Jun 21, 2022

He's a good author but i think this list should have had one of his actual novels, most preferably Go Tell it on the Mountain

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