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Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railway was a winner of The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017. There’s not a lot of room on the front cover for namedropping, but Barrack Obama describes the book as ‘Terrific’ and the New York Review of Books, ‘Dazzling’. I guess it resonates for a number of reasons. In some ways the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia in the nineteenth century, before the...

Both the picks for this week are on the themes of love and journeys, approached in very different ways. Story of the Week goes to rosaliekempthorne's 'Leaving', which evokes the anxieties that love brings, even when, or perhaps particularly when, the love is happy and fully reciprocated. The conclusion of this is superb. This story may have ended, but we are already being led into the narrator's next nighmare: https://www.abctales.com/story/...

The night air is chilled but the climb up the ladder is thrilling…as I lift the skylight’s heavy cover and push it carefully off the opening… I feel the freedom in the first breath of night air as I lift myself up onto the edge...and out onto the roof top...I am immediately thrust into a magical place as I stare into the deep, quiet darkness filled with starlight above and street lights below. It is a world beyond the normal, a world where...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bvbf5n/care I like Jimmy McGovern’s dramas. Apart from Brookside, I’ve probably seen most of them. Care, well, it’s in the title. As a dramatist he’s got to make us care about single mum Jenny (Sheridan Smith) her elderly mum Mary (Alison Steadman) and the distant sister Claire (Sinead Keenan). And he begins with a car crash. Mary crashes the car with two kids in the back. Cue drama as we find out that the...

A Review, by Simon Whitworth AKA Fatboy_74, of Ewan (Lawrie)'s Cerasus Poetry published collection "Last Night I Met John Adcock"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bt8x6z/barbra-streisand-becoming-an-icon-19421984?suggid=b0bt8x6z Barbra Streisand is a bit like the Rorschach-ink-blot test. Ugly or beautiful? Well, my sister Jo, used to get told she looked like Barbra Streisand. In other words, she had a big hooter. This was the consolation prize you didn’t want to win. Streisand redefined what it meant to be beautiful. If you listen to her feminist fan Camille Paglia...

Two legends set the scene for this week's picks. Story of the week is a modern take on a classic tale. The Grandmother, from Penelope Creighton is beautifully executed and perfect reading on a dark cold night. https://www.abctales.com/story/penelopecreighton/grandmother Poem of the week elevates the humble bagel to its rightful status. Alfie Shoyger's ode to the mythic snack will make you smile. https://www.abctales.com/story/alfie-shoyger/bagel...

Poems are small on the page, but can swell to fill the mind.