Nothing Personal

James Baldwin's famous 1964 essay on social isolation, race, and police brutality, published for the first time in a stand-alone gift edition with important new materials.

James Baldwin's critique of American society at the height of the Civil Rights movement is as incisive and relevant as ever. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increased immediacy as more activists and average citizens alike capture injustice on iPhones. Baldwin's documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of the issues we find ourselves in today as the Black Lives Matter movement fights for a more just world.

This new edition, available for the first time in an elegant stand-alone hardcover, includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry, a professor of race, law, literature, and African American Culture who is the author of several books, most notably Looking for Lorraine - a biography of James Baldwin's dear friend Lorraine Hansberry.

Additionally, this edition features an afterword from noted James Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr., who recently published a much-praised biography entitled Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Message for Our Own. James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America's foremost writers. His writing explores palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he lived periodically in exile in the south of France and in Turkey. He is the author of several novels and books of nonfiction, including Notes of a Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and of the poetry collection Jimmy's Blues.