Secret Life of Books

To close out our poopular series on the great American novelist Toni Morrison, SLOB brings listeners a wonderful discussion with the novelist and Harvard literature Professor Namwali Serpell. Namwali is in the middle of book tour, having just published a highly acclaimed book of essays "On Morrison," garnering national and international attnention for giving us new ways to read and appreciate one of America's most important writers.
"On Morrison" is based on a class Namwali has been teaching for several years to her undergraduates at Harvard, in which they read many of Morrison's novels over the course of a single semester. In this conversation we talk about why Toni Morrison's novels became instant classics, why it really matters that her writing is often so difficult, and what Namwali's experiences teaching Morrison in the classroom shows us about how we can address the reading crisis around the world, and how (as ever) classic literature especially offers us crucial ways forward.
Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison."
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Beloved, published in 1987, was Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and instantly seen to be an all-time landmark of American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sophie and Jonty continue their Morrison series by asking what makes Beloved so original, how the novel sets out to depict Black experience as never before, and - a favourite topics on SLOB – what, really, is the ‘ghost’ that haunts the household in this novel?
Beloved was inspired by the true story of the Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1857. On being captured, Garner killed her young daughter to save her from a life of enslavement. At the time the story was a mainstream media sensation, used by abolitionists and pro-slavery voices alike. But in Morrison’s extraordinary retelling it becomes a deep, rich, hard to decipher tale of African-American lives and inner experiences of love, grief, pain and joy from the Middle Passage into the late nineteenth century.
Set mostly in 1873, with numerous flashbacks, Beloved tells the stories of the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. A mother, her lover, her daughter, a ghost and a mysterious woman called Beloved who appears in the home of the protagonist Sethe and her daughter Denver. Through the novel we piece together the backstories of the characters and the impact of slavery on their lives. Morrison wrote that one intention in the book was to ‘make the slave experience intimate’. To achieve this she reinvents literary Modernism and African-American autobiography, with a novel that is uncompromising, frequently horrifying, and very beautiful.

Readings referred to in this episode:
Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature."
___ "The Site of Memory."
Namwali Serpell, On Morrison, Hogarth Press, 2026.

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It’s Oscars week!

The golden statues will get dished out on Sunday evening in Los Angeles and the world will be watching. Literary classics are big, yet again. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet have received multiple nominations, and Jesse Buckley has already won BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance as Anges, aka Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife.

Where do new adaptations and retellings leave the literary originals? Is the rage for reinterpretations revealing that books matter the most, or replacing books with easier, more exciting consumables?
For lovers of Hamnet, does Hamlet still matter and if so, why? Does yet another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this time starring Jacob Elordi, the glowed-up Darcified Heathcliff of Emereld Fennell’s recent “Wuthering Heights,” give us new insights? Or does Shelley’s masterpiece sink beneath the icy polar seas of the Hollywood publicity machine, even as Elordi’s new version of the monster is unsinkable?

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As part of our series on the writing of Toni Morrison we’re lucky enough to record a conversation with one of the world’s leading Toni Morrison scholars, Professor Autumn Womack. Autumn has spent more time with the Morrison Papers at Princeton University than pretty much anyone else – except (maybe) Morrison herself.
Autumn describes the experience of coming to Morrison’s writing for the first time in high school, returning to it years later to her as a graduate student and finally getting to teach Morrison's novels at Princeton, where Morrison spent the last years of her writing life. We hear about the fire that nearly destroyed all Morrison's records, and the librarians who saved her papers.
Autumn explains why archives are anything but boring – and how some discoveries she and her students made can change the way we read Morrison’s great novels.
More about Autumn and her work
https://english.princeton.edu/people/autumn-womack
An essay Autumn mentions: “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984)

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Song of Solomon (1977) propelled Toni Morrison into mainstream recognition as a major American writer, not just of her own generation but all generations, past present and to come. Song tackled something close to the “whole” of African American history, weaving multi-generational stories that included Africa itself, the southern landscapes of plantation slavery and the Civil War, and the post-abolition north. It’s a family chronicle, focusing on the life story of the well-to-do Macon Dead III, aka “Milkman,” who grows from boy to man in 1930s and 40s Michigan. The book brilliantly combines mythology, history, domestic and magical realism.
Song of Solomon quickly became famous, expressing a growing awareness among American readers in the late 1970s that the Black civil rights movement of the past 3 decades was, at best, a partial success. One of Morrison’s signature qualities was to focus on writing about Black characters for Black readers, in ways that moved beyond the tropes, devices and storylines that white readers could understand and that previous generations of Black writers had been able to immerse themselves in,
In this episode, the second in our series on the great Nobel Laureate, we continue the story of how Morrison disrupted virtually all existing expectations about how a Black woman novelist would sound. In Song of Solomon she chose a male protagonist to retell a deep history of African cultural magic, annexing the names, stories and language of the Christian Bible to create a story that refuses to do anything that readers of other American retellings of biblical epics were expecting.

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