Another Country

I loved that this classic by one of America’s greatest literary minds gave me answers about what it would be like if I did what I always dreamed of doing: leaving America behind and moving to France. One of the important things I came to realize was that The Great Escape would not solve your problems, but it would help give you a fresh perspective on things. 

Set against the backdrop of the sociopolitical turmoil of the 1960s, James Baldwin’s Another Country captures a diverse group of friends in cities both foreign and domestic (NYC and France) who are struggling with interconnected issues of race, sexuality, gender, and class.

As history repeats itself in the 21st century, there is wisdom in reviewing how people survived the last round of radical social upheaval. They did so without losing themselves, nor their opportunities to forge meaningful human connections in the melee.

How do you learn from ex-lovers? How do you make peace with the dead? How do you stay… show more.

This is one of my top five books of all time. It’s a novel I gift to friends and certainly friendship is a huge theme of the book.

I picked this up from a bookshop table because I specifically wanted to read a novel that had music in it. The story begins following Rufus, a troubled jazz musician from Harlem and expands to include his friends, a Bohemian collection of New Yorkers. Set in the 1950s and first published in 1962, this novel feels fresh and modern while still being very set in its time. 

Of course, I had to start with Baldwin—my favorite writer—and I chose this one because it captures all the drama, the dazzling and the dark, in the lives of queer artists. It is also a fantastic read—one filled with longing, hope, heartache, love, and lots of sex.

When it was published in the early 1960s it was considered radical to put such taboos—interracial couples, gay sex, adultery, and suicide—so blatantly on the page. And yet it feels wonderfully contemporary, in both its language and passion.

Baldwin was committed to the artist’s promise to tell the truth (saying we were the… show more.