"There\'s no way not to suffer.
It may be the brittle piety of a father who can neve.
It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument.
But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. "There\'s no way not to suffer