Published by Brandeis University Press as part of its Mandel Lectures in the Humanities, this book of essays by acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín celebrates and studies the work of James Baldwin. Each of the five essays examines a book of Baldwin’s, with both personal and critical viewpoints from Tóibín, who admires and relates to the renowned writer and his life. In the first essay, Tóibín compares Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, finding connections between the two authors as young men living abroad in self-imposed exile. Other essays dive into Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. “What gives these pieces such life after all these years is the way in which Baldwin’s intelligence and prose style match each other,” Tóibín writes. On James Baldwin serves as a tribute to the legendary author in his centenary year while offering an analysis of how great fiction is written.
