Giovanni's Room (Vintage International) - Softcover

"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." --Michael Ondaatje

"A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity." --The New York Times

"Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact." --The Washington Post

"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint." --Saturday Review

"Exciting . . . a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction." --The Atlantic

"Violent, excruciating beauty." --San Francisco Chronicle

"To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man --to be forced to understand so much." --Alfred Kazin

"This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." --Saturday Review

"He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being --which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer." --The Nation

"He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he 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 thought." --Langston Hughes

"He has become one of the few writers of our time." --Norman Mailer

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.