Just Above My Head by James Baldwin - 1979

Tight, square spine. Clean, unmarked interior. Gilt to spine and front board remains bright. There is some moderate edge-wear to the boards, as well as some very subtle cosmetic buckling to exterior of the spine. Light shelf-wear to the Mylar-protected jacket. Jacket design by Jack Ribik. Author photo by Max Petrus. Founded in 1923, the Dial Press shared both moniker and address with The Dial magazine (which followed the long arc of American literary fashion from Transcendentalism to modernism), and went on to publish both Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and this one, his sixth and final novel. Written in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, the book is structured circularly around 'Emperor of Soul' Arthur Montana's death and was released to mixed reviews, which ring progressively less true over the years, as time has only shown that Baldwin is at his peak here. 'Memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it,' he writes as he further refines the acutely emotional resonance struck by the themes he explored throughout his life: a reckoning with Christianity, a grappling with shame, brutal confrontation with sexual violence, and the bitter consequences of fame. 500 pp.