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Baldwin: A Love Story

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, read by Ron Butler

‘For me,’ wrote James Baldwin in 1959, ‘the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject – his key and ours to his achievement.’

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time. Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships – geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic – and alchemised them into novels, essays and plays that speak truth to power and which had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history.

Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

Critics Review

Nicholas Boggs’ monumental biography considers James Baldwin through the prism of love, placing four beloved men at the centre of his writing, his activism, his political consciousness, his philosophy and his life. We have been presented with many partial Baldwins over the years, but here is the whole loveable man: the radical and the celebrity, the civil rights hero and the downtown playwright, the cosmopolitan jet-setter and the son of East Harlem. Compulsively interesting and beautifully written, there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it
Zadie Smith
Nicholas Boggs goes far beyond other scholars in tracing Baldwin’s relationships and their role in his work … Everybody knows Baldwin’s name – but the elusiveness remains. The writer and scholar Nicholas Boggs aims to change that in his sensational new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, expanding on what we know of Baldwin’s gifts and suffering, his writing life and his love life … Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes. The churn and swirl of Baldwin’s life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin’s personal life pervades his work … The kind of masterly narrative ability that can be achieved only with deep research and deep understanding of a subject. Boggs has produced a stunning book, one whose true beauty is that it allows Baldwin to reveal himself slowly, almost tenderly. The reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched and the voice that will not be suppressed
New York Times
Gorgeous. Nicholas Boggs’s storytelling, so tenderly rendered, brings us the beautiful yet tattered heart of not only Baldwin the intellectual and artist, but Baldwin the vulnerable, yearning, flesh-and-blood person. This book is so important and timely
Imani Perry, National Book Award winner for SOUTH TO AMERICA
Nicholas Boggs’s meticulously researched and passionately written Baldwin is the crown jewel of the ongoing James Baldwin revival. Boggs, in seamless fashion, vividly recounts the personal life of America’s brave Black novelist, essayist, gay liberation oracle, and civil rights activist. Replete with freshly unearthed revelations about Baldwin’s intimate relationships, this epic biography captures Baldwin in full. Highly recommended!
Douglas Brinkley, author of ROSA PARKS: A LIFE
James Baldwin spent his life being a witness to the world, and for the first time, in Baldwin: A Love Story, we are a witness to him. Nicholas Boggs shows us Baldwin’s brilliance, his desire to change the world, as well as his loneliness, his desire for domesticity, and his determination to leave something behind that would ultimately become our inheritance. So grateful for this stunning work
Lena Waithe, Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and actor
Through this gloriously written and exhaustively researched page-turner of a biography, I’ve just spent the past few weeks moving through the twentieth century with one of the world’s most brilliant writers. I’m better for it
Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow
Magnificent. Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin is a formidable achievement, beautifully written, engrossing, and extremely intimate. Boggs’s long journey as the biographer becomes a wild and most improbable treasure hunt where he unearths more than one poignant love story. James Baldwin’s life is revealed in all its triumphs and agonies
Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
A virtuosic feat of literary imagination, rhapsodic and transportive. Stunningly, it answers not only the question of who James Baldwin was but how he made and remade his art and his world. Fast paced and, at times, movingly tender, with love palpable throughout, the total effect is symphonic. This book deserves a standing ovation
Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE

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