Every man’s life is a fairy-tale written by God’s fingers. Hans Christian Andersen Although April 2, Andersen’s birthday, is celebrated as International Children’s Book Day, the beloved Dane and author of more than 138 fairytales, wrote with a depth and sentiment that far exceeded mere bedtime stories. Few tales have been told that match the wit of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the poignancy of The Little Match Girl or the redemptive purity of The Wild Swans. Listeners both young and young-at-heart will enjoy this collection of freshly-narrated classic tales.

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race, and America in the 1950s.

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. It is a novel of passions–sexual, racial, political, artistic–that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the 1950s.

In the preface to the 1867 Charles Dickens edition of the beloved masterpiece, he wrote, “… like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield.” The author’s most autobiographical work, along with his social-reform inspiring classic, Oliver Twist, is faithfully adapted for young listeners in this wonderfully narrated presentation of two timeless Dickens tales.

“Quixotic” is a word that the dictionary defines as “extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary…” and that is a fitting definition, indeed, for this charming retelling of Don Quixote, the 17th century Spanish classic by Miguel de Cervantes, now updated for the modern reader. The gallant and fragile Quixote will touch listeners, as will his faithful squire Sancho Panza and the tragically beautiful heroine of the gentle Don’s chivalries, the fair Dulcinea. Don Quixote is rightfully noted to “…move to pity rather than ridicule, and to tears as well as laughter. And herein lies its chief claim to greatness, that it seems to have been written not for one country nor for one age alone, but to give delight to all humankind.”

“The whole castle was wide awake, and everything was moving once more…” Fairy tales have never ceased to spark the imagination, and beyond fueling creativity, the timeless stories included in The Fairy Reader also teach such valuable lessons as contentment, patience, gentleness and respect. Adapted for young children, these fairytales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, bring the magical delight of lively narration to such classics as “The Ugly Duckling” and “Briar Rose” to a whole new generation of readers.

An engaging introduction to four of the greatest Americans–George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln

The lives of these gentlemen are set forth in a simple manner, yet the stories are filled with many interesting details. Children will learn about each man’s trials and successes, and how these experiences molded their character. Patriotic and engaging, Four Great Americans will inspire young listeners and give them a greater appreciation for American history.

Bring history back to life through this historically accurate and edifying program read by Jim Hodges.

An engaging introduction to four of the greatest Americans: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. Their lives are set forth in a simple manner, yet with many interesting details. A glimpse is given of the trials and successes which combined to mold their character and afford such stirring examples for the youth of today. The stories are patriotic in every line, and inspire the listener to the best of thoughts and deeds.

Written in the 1800s, the Young Listeners Collection features children’s stories from yesterday’s classics. Learn from our nation’s founders whose Christian faith was lived out in the lives of the characters in these stories.

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.

With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (Chicago Sun-Times).

James Baldwin’s stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the Black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America.

Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Go Tell It on the Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.

“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying–and informed throughout by Baldwin’s uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators–Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

These five recordings of twentieth-century American authors interpreting their own works were highly praised when first released in the 1960s. Today the cultural and historical value of these recordings makes them an essential part of our literary heritage.

This volume contains readings by James Baldwin from Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, exploring the challenges of being black and gay in mid-twentieth century America. William Styron reads about a disabled child finding brief moments of joy in Lie Down in Darkness, his novel about a troubled Southern family. James Jones reads the most famous passage from his celebrated World War II novel, From Here to Eternity. And Philip Roth does a hilarious comic turn in a bizarre scene from his early novel, Letting Go.

Travelers visit many strange places. They see very many wonderful things. When they return home they tell wonderful stories about what they have seen. Thus begin the words of Jonathan Swift’s immortal Lemuel Gulliver in his witty masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. Retold for the modern young reader while retaining all of the tongue-in-cheek charm and political satire of the original classic, the adventures of the keenly observant Gulliver in Lilliput and Brobdingnag are certain to enchant a whole new generation of listeners.

From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime–“a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless” (The New York Times Book Review).”One of the best books Baldwin has ever written–perhaps the best of all.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

In this honest and stunning novel, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad.

Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and is imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions–affection, despair, and hope.

In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, the gathering place of artists, writers, and musicians, is the setting of Another Country, Baldwin’s third novel. The characters, all involved in complex interracial relationships, cluster around Rufus, a jazz musician whose suicide affects them profoundly. For Baldwin, Rufus represents “the black corpse floating in the national psyche.” Baldwin’s first reading on this recording portrays Rufus’ state of mind in his final moments.

Baldwin’s second reading is a sermon by Reverend Foster, addressing Rufus’ friends and family at his funeral. In his adolescence Baldwin himself was a Pentecostal preacher, following in his stepfather’s footsteps. After a few years he abandoned his faith, but the sonorous sentences and exhortations of black religious oratory continued to inform his writing. This sermon is an electrifying example of that oratory applied to the subject of racial struggle.

Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s second novel, deals frankly with homosexuality in a manner daring for its time. It depicts a white American struggling to accept his homoerotic desires. David, the protagonist, like Baldwin himself, feels alienated from his native country and moves to Paris in search of a freer life. In the passage Baldwin reads on this recording, David recalls a childhood sexual encounter with another boy–an encounter that left him deeply upset and ambivalent about his manhood.

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that inflames his nonfiction work.

Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Montana and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses–and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin’s fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works.

In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain–the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer’s ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin’s controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman. And it explores such varied themes as the relations between blacks and whites, the role of blacks in America and in Europe, and the question of sexual identity.

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin’s most influential work!

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in “The Harlem Ghetto” to a sobering “Journey to Atlanta.”

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright’s work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

Notes is the book that established Baldwin’s voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin’s own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.

James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.

Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020—which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy—Baldwin’s documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we find ourselves today.

Baldwin’s thoughts move through an interconnected range of questions, from America’s fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. This edition also includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry and an afterword from noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Both explore and situate the essay within the broader context of Baldwin’s work, the Movement for Black Lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Nothing Personal is both a eulogy and a declaration of will. In bringing this work into the twenty-first century, readers new and old will take away fundamental and recurring truths about life in the US. It is both a call to action, and an appeal to love and to life.

“Poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you? Where have you been? How come you here?” In Daniel Defoe’s 17th century masterpiece of English literature, hero Robinson Crusoe relates his story of shipwreck, perseverance hope and redemption. Full of adventure, suspense and daring heroics, this celebration of Robinson Crusoe, updated for the modern young reader, retains all of the classic elements of Defoe’s original tale of courage, insight and the power of endurance.

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, Baldwin shows 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 intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a major work of American literature.

Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics.

Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.

Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here too is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER – The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s–and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. – “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” –Ta-Nehisi CoatesAt once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle … all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.

An essential compendium of James Baldwin’s most powerful nonfiction work, calling on us “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.”

Personal and prophetic, these essays uncover what it means to live in a racist American society with insights that feel as fresh today as they did over the 4 decades in which he composed them. Longtime Baldwin fans and especially those just discovering his genius will appreciate this essential collection of his great nonfiction writing, available for the first time in affordable paperback. Along with 46 additional pieces, it includes the full text of dozens of famous essays from such books as:

   • Notes of a Native Son
   • Nobody Knows My Name
   • The Fire Next Time
   • No Name in the Street
   • The Devil Finds Work

This collection provides the perfect entrée into Baldwin’s prescient commentary on race, sexuality, and identity in an unjust American society.