Yesterday Will Make You Cry

Late in his career and life, Chester Himes authored a famous PI series while living in France. This book is his first novel republished the way he originally wrote it in 1998. Much of the story takes place in an Ohio prison during the 1930s when Mr. Himes was also incarerated for seven years. The pr......more

This novel is mind-blowing. It's a prison novel from the mid-1950s in the United States that tells the story of an incarcerated man named Jimmy and his relationship (this takes up most of the last third of the book) with another man called Prince Rico. This is a humane, generous study of men behind......more

Read it for University. Was a good book. Can see the merits but without a proper narrative it wouldn't be the sort I would read all the time.......more

The first hundred pages, I didn't know how I was gonna get through it. Names come and go. Things that would be disturbing in the outside world happen on the periphery and "That happened." was often the only commentary. Then there was the prison fire, a magnificent piece of writing taking up a huge c......more

Himes wrote "literary novels" that were garish extensions of Richard Wrights social protest/white women killer fiction; and detective novels that read too much like a middle-aged expat trying to be down in Harlem. It took me forever to come up to the re-release of the original version of "Yesterday"......more