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Summary
Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award
A 2012Audie Award Finalist
“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.
By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying—and informed throughout by Baldwin’s uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators—Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
Review Quotes
“Dion Graham’s reading requires him to master an array of voices: hellfire-preaching ministers, deliciously profane Harlem locals,…kittenish women. Graham ranges from tremulous exertion to sudden flashes of rage, his reading flecked by an exhaustion that creeps in at the margins of Baldwin’s prose. Baldwin’s protagonists are weary of a world that allows them no respite from racism and hatred, and Graham echoes that weariness, his voice hushed and low, its register reflecting their struggle to survive.”
Publishers Weekly
“Many of these situations don’t occur in quite the same ways now, but narrator Dion Graham makes them timely and universally human…a heartbreaking performance…Graham’s reading pulls the listener back to a time when [these stories] were fresh, raw wounds.”
AudioFile
“Timeless in its treatment of youthful innocence, prejudice, addiction, loneliness, fear, and human suffering…Dion Graham is masterly in his rendering of the vast array of characters in these eight disparate tales. Highly recommended.”
Library Journal
“All of these tales have an undeniable urgency, power, and anger…Symphonic in structure, mixing religious and sexual motifs, encompassing various shades of characters and situations…memorable in every sense; funny, sad, colorful, it is a triumphant performance.”
Kirkus Reviews
Author Bio:
James Baldwin (1924–1987), acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, was educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, received excellent reviews and was immediately recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans’ refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time. The next year, he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. His other collaborations include A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead and A Dialogue with the poet–activist Nikki Giovanni. He also adapted Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost. He was made a commander of the French Legion of Honor a year before his death, one honor among many he achieved in his life.
Additional Titles by the Author
read by Bahni Turpin
read by Adam Lazarre-White
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
read by Kevin Kenerly
read by Ron Butler
read by Dion Graham
Reader Bio:
Dion Graham, from HBO’s The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. Winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, he has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. His performances have been praised as thoughtful and compelling, vivid and full of life.
