The Bird King

The Bird King

A fantastical journey set at the height of the Spanish Inquisition from the award-winning author of Alif the Unseen and writer of the Ms. Marvel series, G. Willow Wilson's The Bird King is a jubilant story of love versus power, religion versus faith, and freedom versus safety. G. Willow Wilson's debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan has a secret--he can draw maps of places he's never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan's surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan's gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As Fatima and Hassan traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

Bear and the Bird King

The Death of the Bird King

Once upon a time there was a bad, bad poet called James, whose head was nothing more than a huge egg with facial features crudely appended. And one day, while James was on the toilet thinking about a line from The Waste Land ("Hieronymo's mad againe"), the egg cracked open and out lurched an ambiguous creature called the Bird King. From the moment he stepped into our world, the Bird King was very busy. He flapped his patchy wings, made absurd laws, fell in love with inanimate objects. Following him around with his head still gaping and his mulchy brain exposed, James recorded the Bird King's episodic adventures, transmitting them to the world through Twitter. ****************************************** Enjoy James Knight's latest collection of broken stories, poetic fragments and assembled pictures, including the long poems "The Death of the Bird King", "The Monsters" and "The Madness of the Bird King", as well as "Oneiroscope", 24 original artworks and 60 short pieces.