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Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Series: Penguin Modern Classics
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Check link for latest rating. ( 4,964 ratings, 573 reviews)
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Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
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Description
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is Baldwin's fourth novel, recounting a lifetime of grappling with love, loss, and identity.
'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it.'
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage.
And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that seems poised on the brink of racial war. In this tender, angry 1968 novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking charactersβa man struggling to become himself.
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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is praised for its truthful and soul-stirring writing, capturing deep family attachments and intense emotional resonance. Critics laud Baldwin as a visionary and essential novelist whose work remains timeless, with the novel offering a jazz-like exploration of his own life through reconfiguration and creative narrative elements.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780241342039
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 04 October 2018
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 22.0mm
Width: 130.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 288g
Pages: 384
About the Author
James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships- a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France
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