Going to Meet the Man: Stories
A major collection of short fiction—including the story "Sonny's Blues"—by one of America’s most important writers, exploring the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators.
In this modern classic, "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 detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head 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, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.
Including:
The Rockpile
The Outing
The Man Child
Previous Condition
Sonny's Blues
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon
Come Out the Wilderness
Going to Meet the Man
In this modern classic, "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 detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head 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, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.
Including:
The Rockpile
The Outing
The Man Child
Previous Condition
Sonny's Blues
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon
Come Out the Wilderness
Going to Meet the Man
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Community Reviews
A fantastic collection of narratives that have nothing yet everything to do with each other. Baldwin’s ability to invoke and evoke shines through in this book of shifting perspectives. Dynamic life is breathed into every character in Going to Meet the Man, big or small, for their better or for their worse. The timelessness of the greater conversations Baldwin tackles here spark a great curiosity, as each account evidences an unyielding poignance and a somber power. While it is in no way a light read, as the struggles of each protagonist cut a reader deep - in one way or another - there are countless gripping first-person revelations and even more beguiling quotes. Each story on its own earns its space and will follow you home. “There are so many ways to tell the truth,” writes Baldwin, as he manages to masterfully show the reader even more truths than he already tells.
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