Giovanni's Room

In a tone equal parts nave and urbane, Matt Bomer brings an authentic and absolutely American middle-class voice to James Baldwin's 1956 bestseller. The story, controversial at the time, is about a white New Yorker living in Paris who has a fiery and ultimately tragic love affair with a young, gay Italian bartender while his fiance is on holiday in Spain. In his fine introduction poet Kevin Young places GIOVANNI'S ROOM in the top tier of classic twentieth-century and LGBTQ+ (called "strange" in the 1950s) literature. But it's Bomer's even, sometimes melancholy delivery that takes listeners on a journey into closeted gay life, the search for what it is to be a man, and, chiefly, what it is to be in love. Here, nobody makes it out unscathed. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine