Giovanni's Room

David is an American in Paris who falls in love with Giovanni — an Italian bartender — while his girlfriend Hella is traveling in Spain. The novel traces his inability to accept that love, the shame and self-hatred that makes him destroy the person he loves most. Baldwin wrote this in 1956 — a white cast, a European setting — because he wanted to write about homosexuality without the additional weight of race, which he explored elsewhere. The most precise novel ever written about the internalized homophobia of a man who loves men and cannot survive loving them. Short, devastating, perfect.