Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
  • Published: 25 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241392249
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Oct 2018
EBook
25 Oct 2018
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Baldwin's fourth novel recounts 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 characters: a man struggling to become himself.
  • Published: 25 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241392249
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
Categories:

Also by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room
I Am Not Your Negro
The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name ; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work
Encounter on the Seine
No Name in the Street
The James Baldwin Collection
The Harlem Ghetto
See all

Praise for Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

A jazzlike reconfiguration of Baldwin's own life, with existing parts examined and rearranged and new parts added

Clifford Thompson, LA Review of Books

Timeless . . . a visionary writer

Guardian

One of the few essential novelists of our time

New Statesman

Truth-telling, witness bearing, soul stirring writing

Cornel West

The emotion surrounding family attachment... is deeply felt and is one of the reasons he continues to be read with such intensity

Colm Tóibín