James Baldwin

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country 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. "Brilliantly and fiercely told." —The New York Times Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

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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