This handsome box set of three classic James Baldwin novels features cover art by Beauford Delaney, a friend and contemporary of Baldwin and an influential painter in his own right. Delaney’s cheerful yet oddly intense Baldwin portraits are the perfect complement to this box set, which celebrates the centenary of Baldwin’s birth.

Included in this box are Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovannis Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk, in redesigned softcover editions with new introductions by Roxane Gay, Kevin Young, and Brit Bennett.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwins first major work, based in part on his own childhood. With lyrical precision and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.

Giovannis Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. One of the first novels to openly explore the theme of homosexuality, it paved the way for generations of gay and lesbian novelists.

And If Beale Street Could Talk is a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime. It’s a profoundly moving novel about love in the face of injustice that is as socially resonant today as it was when it was first published.