Gramercy Book Club Features Toni Morrison's BELOVED in April!

Gramercy Book Club’s April selection is , the powerful and unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from acclaimed Nobel Prize winner . This book club program kicks off the first of three of Morrison’s novels that Gramercy Books will be exploring in 2026 in partnership with Ohioana Library as part of a statewide initiative celebrating Morrison’s indelible impact. Ohio State University English professor and Beloved scholar will facilitate the group discussion.

A ticket to this program includes a copy of BELOVED. It is strongly encouraged that registrants read the book prior to the program.

OHIOANA LIBRARY and the OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this program.

Sethe was born enslaved in Kentucky, escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times

Toni Morrison was the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

Jim Phelan is Distinguished University Professor and Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. He teaches and writes about narrative theory, the medical humanities, the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present, and nonfictional narrative. Jim also serves as Director of Project Narrative at Ohio State, a cluster of faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students who work on narrative and narrative theory. He is the author or co-author of eleven books and editor or co-editor of another eleven, as well as approximately 180 essays. From 1992 until last year, he served as the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, where he was named the recipient of its Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2025, Jim was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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