James Baldwin

Contains eight short fiction stories about men and women who are struggling in their own ways to survive the traumas of life.

Going to Meet the Man

Kyla MacDonald 

Everyone should read something by James Baldwin. This is a lovely place to introduce yourself. Baldwin does a fantastic job of drafting surface-level simplistic stories that emotionally creep up on the reader. The themes and subjects within the collection are none to take lightly. "Sonny's Blues" and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" are my personal favorites. Couldn't recommend James Baldwin enough!

John Balek

Going To Meet The Man is my introduction to James Baldwin. I have a few book from him that I want to read but this just happened to be the book available when I was recently looking at bookstores. I don't often read short stories collections so this was a good change of pace for me.

I thought this was a good introduction to Baldwin's writing style. You get to see what he is capable of in short bursts and different topics. I am really surprised how memorable all of these stories are. While some are clearly better than others, I can tell you a basic synopsis for each of them as well as their overall themes. This is due to how great Baldwin can write characters. Considering how short some of these stories can be, I was surprise how much Baldwin developed characters in such a short period of them. You really get to build an understanding of each main character he writes about.

Baldwin covers so many different topics and does such a good job of writing convincing characters of all types of backgrounds. While many stories are very clearly based off events of his actual life he writes from so many different perspectives. He writes men, women, Black people, white people, children, adults, people of his time, people of prior periods all with such a greatly convincing manner. It's amazing how well he creates a narrative and captures the mannerisms of specific people to add to their believability.

The book does start off with a few slower, lower stakes, stories but it builds in intensity and gravitas as it goes along; ending with the defining masterpiece that this collection is named after. The final story is such an immense high in writing proficiency that it almost minimizes the impact of the stories that came before it. While this imbalance does kind of throw off the overall quality of this book I think there is no better way to structure a collection like this than to make it the finale.

I found many of the other stories to be great in their own right. The descriptions of Jazz music being played in "Sonny's Blues" are some of the best I've ever read. The commentaries on the society of Baldwin's time (and often still our own) in "Previous Condition", This Morning, This Evening, This Soon", and "Come Out The Wilderness" all are great thought pondering themes that you will continue to reflect on long after you finish reading them.

I'm excited to read more from Baldwin and I think a longer form narrative can only improve on what I've experienced here.

Vanessa Dendinger

Andrew Louis

anna elisabeth

Laura Leila Marta

Val Moon

'Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion' Guardian How our earliest experiences can shape our destiny is the theme that runs like a thread of revelation through these extraordinary stories. They explore the roots of love, of murder and of racial conflict, from the child in 'The Rockpile' who can never be forgiven by his God-fearing father for his illegitimacy to the loneliness of a young black girl in love with a white man who, she knows, will leave her in 'Come Out of the Wilderness' and the horrifying story of the initiation of a racist as a man remembers his parents taking him to see the mutilation and murder of a black man in 'Going to Meet the Man'. In them Baldwin unlocks the concepts of history and prejudice and probes beneath the skin to the soul.