Synopsis
Baldwin writes an affecting, affirming, bluesy love story about a pair of teenage lovers--one in jail, one pregnant--and their attempts to stay together and raise a family in the face of racist oppression. Fonny, the artist, is arrested for a crime he didn't commit and incarcerated in the Tombs. His devoted girlfriend, Tish, is determined to get him out.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1988-05-01 | | Edition Description: | Reissue |
| Size | | Height: | 6.8 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 4.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
A love story about two badly frightended but intensely brave, black young people.
Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realisitic tale... a powerful endictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time.
Industry Reviews
"[This novel] is economically, almost poetically constructed, and may certainly be read as a kind of allegory, which refuses conventional outbursts of violence, preferring to stress the provisional, tentative nature of our lives....Tish's voice comes to seem absolutely natural and we learn to know her from the inside out. Even her flights of poetic fancy...are convincing. Also convincing is Baldwin's insistence upon the primacy of emotions like love, hate, or terror: it is not sentimentality, but basic psychology....[This] is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless--an art that has not the slightest need of esthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic excesses."
New York Times Book Review - Joyce Carol Oates (05/19/1974)
"A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless."
Joyce Carol Oates
"To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, in America, the Negro, the white man--to be forced to understand so much."
Alfred Kazin
"Baldwin...tries to show the impact that getting caught up in the US justice system has on ordinary people. In his scheme it simply makes them heroic. No other novelist since Balzac has hated the cops so much, but Baldwin wants to celebrate a black family's survival, to praise the bonds between sisters, between parents and child."
New York Review of Books - Darryl Pinckney (04/13/2000)
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