Recommendations
Books Like Giovanni's Room
Best books to read after Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Baldwin's 1956 perfect short novel — David, a white American in Paris who cannot accept his desire for the Italian bartender Giovanni — is one of the founding texts of queer literary fiction and Baldwin's most formally accomplished work. These recommendations extend the experience through Baldwin's other novels, through the international tradition of literary fiction about queer identity, and through fiction that shares its investigation of self-denial and the cost of refusing to live the life you actually have.
- 1Buy
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's 1953 debut — the autobiographical account of John Grimes's religious crisis on his fourteenth birthday, moving between the present of a Harlem Pentecostal church service and the pasts of his father Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth, and his aunt Florence. Go Tell It on the Mountain is the essential Baldwin before Giovanni's Room: it shows Baldwin's formation (the Black Pentecostal world, the father, Harlem) that Giovanni's Room departs from, and the same investigation of the relationship between religious certainty and authentic selfhood that Giovanni's Room conducts on different terrain.
- 2Buy
Another Country
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's 1962 third novel and his most comprehensive engagement with race, sexuality, and New York — a large novel with multiple protagonists across Black and white, gay and straight, American and French communities, organized around the suicide of the jazz musician Rufus Scott. Another Country shows what Baldwin was capable of at full scale; Giovanni's Room shows him at his most concentrated and formally controlled. Both are essential; Giovanni's Room is the better introduction, Another Country the larger statement.
- 3Buy
Maurice
by E.M. Forster
Forster's 1914 novel — published posthumously in 1971, on Forster's instructions, because he could not publish it while homosexuality was illegal in England — about a Cambridge undergraduate who falls in love with another man and eventually finds happiness with a gamekeeper. Maurice is the closest English predecessor to Giovanni's Room: both novels are about a man who cannot initially accept his homosexual desire, and both are organized around the choice between a 'respectable' life that denies that desire and an 'unrespectable' life that accepts it. Forster gives the happy ending he could not give while alive; Baldwin gives the tragic one.
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Call Me By Your Name
by André Aciman
Aciman's 2007 companion in the tradition of the literary novel about a summer love that reshapes an entire life — Elio and Oliver's relationship at a summer house in the Italian Riviera. Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni's Room are companion studies in the relationship between a young man and an older (or more certain) man that forms the younger one's sense of what desire and love can be — both end with loss, and both are structured around the memory of that loss.
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Yanagihara's 2015 companion in the tradition of the literary novel about friendship and suffering as forms of love — four friends across decades in New York, centering on Jude St. Francis. A Little Life and Giovanni's Room are both novels organized around the retrospective reconstruction of a catastrophe (Jude's past; Giovanni's execution), and both are studies in the relationship between love and destruction — how the people we love can destroy us, and how we can destroy them.
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The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall
Hall's 1928 companion in the history of queer literary fiction — the story of Stephen Gordon, an 'invert' (Hall's term) who is rejected by the woman she loves and sacrifices her happiness to send her to a man who can give her the conventional life that Stephen cannot. The Well of Loneliness is the most important precursor in English to Giovanni's Room: both novels are structured around a homosexual protagonist's recognition that the world will not accommodate their desire, and both end with sacrifice. Hall is more sentimental; Baldwin is more ruthless about David's self-deception.
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Brokeback Mountain
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's 1997 story (expanded from its publication in The New Yorker into a widely read standalone novella and the basis for the 2005 Ang Lee film) — Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist's twenty-year love across the impossible circumstances of rural Wyoming. Brokeback Mountain and Giovanni's Room are the two most celebrated American works of queer fiction about the cost of a love that the social world refuses to accommodate — both are studies in what is lost when desire cannot be lived.
- 8Buy
Orlando
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's 1928 companion in the literary tradition of queer desire given form through formal experiment — Orlando's gender transformation and the three-hundred-year life it makes possible. Orlando is the joyful, utopian version of the freedom that Giovanni's Room shows as impossible in the world that actually exists: where Woolf imagines a consciousness that can love freely across gender and time, Baldwin shows what happens when that freedom is denied in mid-century Paris and New York.
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