The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.

Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

The Spring 2025 issue of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal comprises over 200 pages of poems, essays, interviews, and reviews edited by Naush Sabah.

Rowland Bagnall reviews Go Figure, Kavita Bhanot on the Idea(l) of Literature, Gerry Cambridge on Anthony Hecht, Caroline Clark on the Moscow nightingale, Fred D’Aguiar on Benjamin Zephaniah and reviewing [...] and Forest of Noise, W. J. Davies interviews Peter Robinson on Roy Fisher, Julie Irigaray on Rimbaud, Gregory Leadbetter reviews Worlds Woven Together, Andrew Neilson on Roddy Lumsden, Clare Pollard on invented creatures, Camille Ralphs interviews Andrew Motion and Michael Hofmann, Jacqueline Saphra on teaching poetry, Alina Stefanescu on the republic of letters, Sarah Westcott on animal hearts, and Jeremy Wikeley reviews Come Here to This Gate.

Poems by Paul atten Ash, Khairani Barokka, Daragh Byrne, Troy Cabida, Gerry Cambridge, Sophia Rubina Charalambous, Courtney Conrad, Meredith MacLeod Davidson, Yanita Georgieva, Cathra Kelliher, Richard Lambert, Gregory Leadbetter, Angela Leighton, Dominic Leonard, Rob McClure, Andrew Hykel Mears, Alex Mepham, Benedict Newbery, Sarah O’Connor, Anita Pati, Hua Qing (translated by Liang Yujing), Tim Relf, Jake Reynolds, Paul Robert, Julie Runacres, Laura Theis, Nadira Clare Wallace, and Rich Ware.

The Amazing Adventures of Master Storyteller John Row...

John Row has been a professional artist, writer, performer for sixty years.He's been everywhere, man, studying at art school with a teenage Brian Eno, in at the early days of Rock Against Racism, touring with punk and reggae bands, hip hop artists and, more recently, in his mid-seventies and during Covid lockdown, curating the worldstorytellingcafe.com website and directing the Marrakech International Storytelling Festival once the borders were reopened.

Dive into a collision of memories, anecdotes and thoughts drawn from six decades of being at the cutting edge of street poets and alternative lifestyles, giving voice to the unheard and celebrating life in all its diversions and diversities. 

John Row is a force of nature. Take it from the one who knows...

Himself!

Potiki is a novel by New Zealand author Patricia Grace. First published in 1986, the book is a significant work in contemporary Māori literature, and explores themes of cultural identity, land rights, and the impacts of urban development on indigenous communities. It was critically and commercially successful, and received the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1987. It was published during the Māori renaissance, a period of time in which Māori culture and language was experiencing a revitalisation, and academics have described it as being part of that movement. Due to its themes of Māori resistance to colonialisation, the novel was viewed by some critics as political, although Grace has said that her intention was to write about people living ordinary lives. It was also unusual for its time in not including an English glossary of te reo Māori (Māori language) words, on the basis that Grace did not want Māori to be "treated as a foreign language in its own country".

Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An ex-slave is haunted by a lonely, rebukeful ghost, bent on bringing their past home. Strange and unexpected, yet always stirring, Morrison’s writing on race sinks us deep into the heart and mind of our troubled humanity.

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected. Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Tariq Ali tells us the story of the aftermath of the fall of Granada by narrating a family sage of those who tried to survive after the collapse of their world. Ali is particularly deft at evoking what life must have been like for those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom. "This is a novel that have something to say, and says it well."—The Guardian

At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation, unabridged for the first time, and the first ever direct translation from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.

In Solaris, Kris Kelvin arrives on an orbiting research station to study the remarkable ocean that covers the planet’s surface. But his fellow scientists appear to be losing their grip on reality, plagued by physical manifestations of their repressed memories. When Kelvin’s long-dead wife suddenly reappears, he is forced to confront the pain of his past - while living a future that never was. Can Kelvin unlock the mystery of Solaris? Does he even want to?

Lured South by tales of buried treasure, Milkman embarks on an odyssey back home.

As a boy, Milkman was raised beneath the shadow of a status-obsessed father. As a man, he trails in the fiery wake of a friend bent on racial revenge. Now comes Milkman’s chance to uncover his own path. Along the way, he will lose more than he could have ever imagined. Yet in return, he will discover something far more valuable than gold: his past, his true self, his life-long dream of flight.

‘A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story’ Daily Telegraph

‘Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life’ Marlon James

INTRODUCED BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR MARLON JAMES

**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**