The extraordinary biography of two of the world's greatest athletes - Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Jesse Owens and Joe Louis have been hailed as American icons for the last sixty-five years, yet they were unfailingly human in everything they achieved and endured: as vulnerable as they were courageous; as troubled as they were brilliant; as restless in themselves as they are now rooted in history. IN BLACK AND WHITE will tell, for the first time, the story of the shared political legacy, extraordinary personal links and enduring friendship between 4-times Olympic gold medallist Jesse Owens, and Heavyweight World Boxing Champion Joe Louis, black athletes born in an America demeaned by racism and poverty. Award-winning sports journalist Donald McRae explores these two most revered of sportsmen whose finest achievements cannot be diminished by their later tragedies; their little-known stretches of debt, despair, drug-addiction and mental illness as they struggled to find a life beyond the track and the ring. It is a deeply personal story of two of the greatest athletes the world has ever known.

Magma 87, Islands, edited by Niall Campbell, Fiona Moore, and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa Each new Magma theme raises the question: how will people write it, how will they startle and delight us? This time we were set on capturing something of the variety and scope that the theme of Islands offered. We hoped to invert majority notions of centre and periphery. We wanted the wild and windswept. At the same time we looked for poems that subverted, ignored or went beyond island clichés, far from the island gift shop cards with yearningly beautiful images.

Mornings in Jenin is a devastating novel of love and loss, war and oppression, and heartbreak and hope, spanning five countries and four generations of one of the most intractable conflicts of our lifetime. Palestine, 1948. Half a million Palestinians are forced from their homes. A mother clutches her six-month-old son as Israeli soldiers march through the village of Ein Hod. In a split second, her son is snatched from her arms and the fate of the Abulheja family is changed forever. Forced into a refugee camp in Jenin and exiled from the ancient village that is their lifeblood, the family struggles to rebuild their world. Their stories unfold through the eyes of the youngest sibling, Amal, the daughter born in the camp who will eventually find herself alone in the United States; the eldest son who loses everything in the struggle for freedom; the stolen son who grows up as an Israeli, becoming an enemy soldier to his own brother.

Travelog, social commentary, and journey to self-discovery, the story of a black Englishman's amazing trek through Dixie to connect with his racial identity In 1997 Gary Younge explored the American South by retracing the route of the original Freedom Riders of the 1960s. His road trip was a remarkable socio-cultural adventure for an outsider. He was British, journalistically curious, and black. As he traveled by Greyhound bus through the former Confederate states, he experienced an awakening. He felt culturally tied to this strange yet familiar place. Though a Briton by birth and the child of emigrants from Barbados, he felt culturally alien in his native land. In Dixie, however, he met African Americans whose racial distinctiveness was similar to his own. To local blacks he looked like a brother, while sounding intriguingly foreign. As he assessed their political rise in the South, he noted too how African American tradition seemed static and unchanged. It was a refreshing whiff of "home." 

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organisers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres - sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism - but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.

Translated into English for the first time after its publication in 1967, Ghassan Kanafani's On Zionist Literature makes an incisive analysis of the body of literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Interweaving his literary criticism of works by George Eliot, Arthur Koestler, and many others with a historical materialist narrative, Kanafani identifies the political intent and ideology of Zionist literature, demonstrating how the myths used to justify the Zionist-imperialist domination of Palestine first emerged and were repeatedly propagated in popular literary works in order to generate support for Zionism and shape the Western public's understanding of it. The new preface by Anni Kanafani and an introduction by Steven Salaita place On Zionist Literature in its broader historical context and make a compelling case for its ongoing significance more than five decades since its original publication, illustrating the extent to which "Kanafani was a searing and incisive critic, at once generous in his understanding of emotion and form and unsparing in his assessment of politics and myth."

A collection of fifty-five feminist poets with an introductory essay, biographical notes and author photos.

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.