James Baldwin

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, 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.

Another Country

Mara D Alo Fonseca

Rufus thought, But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep and changed the world forever. It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.

Only, we've been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know where we are.

There was a high, driving wind which brightened the eyes and the faces of the people and forced their lips slightly apart, so that they all seemed to be carrying, to some immense encounter, the bright, fragile bubble of a lifetime of expectation.

If you can get through the worst, you'll see the best.

I wasn’t nothing but a child; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him, and as necessary as the sun which bathed the bodies of himself and his lover now. Lying in this garden now, so warm, covered, and apprehensive, he saw them on the angular, blazing streets of his childhood, and in the shuttered houses, and in the fields. They laughed differently from other people, so it had seemed to him, and moved with more beauty and violence, and they smelled like good things in the oven. 

The sky looked, now, like a vast and friendly ocean, in which drowning was forbidden, and the stars seemed stationed there, like beacons. To what country đid this ocean lead?

 "I mean, I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want." He paused. Or think you want."

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