GRAMERCY BOOK CLUB FEATURES TONI MORRISON'S THE BLUEST EYE IN JUNE!

A partnership with Ohioana Library, this second of three Morrison-focused discussions will be led by poet, cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib!

Gramercy Book Club’s June pick is The Bluest Eye, the first novel written by American author Toni Morrison and published in 1970. This book club program is the second 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. Poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib will facilitate the group discussion.

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

OHIOANA LIBRARY is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this program.

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace.

“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

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.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a nationally acclaimed poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book of essays, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and named one of the ten best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Crown Ain't Worth Much and A Fortune for Your Disaster. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a Award. In 2021, he was named a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow.