Watch Narrative cofounders and editors Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks share a special inaugural Narrative Reader’s Club featuring Tom’s new book, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”—from the My Reading series from Oxford University Press.
During the course of this exchange between these two longtime writers and editors, Tom and Carol discuss what makes some stories timeless or indelible, and share what they look for in a story. Together, they get to the heart of the lyrical movements in Baldwin's timeless piece.
After reading some of his favorite passages from "Sonny's Blues," Tom spends time talking about his own book, Baldwin’s inspiration and influence on millions of readers everywhere, and the humanizing power of great stories to transform our experience of the world and our understanding of each other.
About My Reading of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”:
For more than thirty-five years Tom Jenks has been rereading and teaching “Sonny’s Blues,” a story of a black algebra teacher learning of his brother’s heroin addiction in 1950s Harlem.
Jenks’s reading of the story follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers.
This personal reading of “Sonny’s Blues” provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying Baldwin’s perfect short story, with references to Edward P. Jones (whose magnificent story “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” bears a knowing relationship to “Sonny’s Blues”), to Charlie Parker’s music, and to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” as part of the musical progression Baldwin creates, and with attention to Baldwin’s oratorical gifts and the biblical references in the story, to its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and, most of all, its totality of effect.
Drawing on Baldwin’s book-length essay The Fire Next Time, which Baldwin published a half dozen years after the publication of the short story, Jenks offers insight on some of the sources in Baldwin’s life for “Sonny’s Blues” and on the logic and passion by which life may be meaningfully transformed into art.
