Toni Morrison's Books

The Writer Before the Page

From The Source of Self-Regard

By: Toni Morrison

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The Writer Before the Page

From The Source of Self-Regard

By: Toni Morrison

A Vintage Shorts selection. In her elegant yet piercing style, one of our most celebrated and revered writers, Toni Morrison, interrogates the writer’s task and responsibility in two illuminating and essential pieces. Initially delivered as parts of lecture series and collected in The Source of Self-Regard, these pieces exhibit the depth with which Morrison probes the capacity and power of literature. An ebook short.

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593082176

ISBN 13

9780593082171

Love

A Novel

By: Toni Morrison

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Love

A Novel

By: Toni Morrison

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a spellbinding symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of Black women in a fading beach town. “A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: As Morrison’s protagonists stake their furious claim on Cosey’s memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny, erotic, and heartwrenching.

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218

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400078474

ISBN 13

9781400078479

Toni Morrison

Conversations

By: Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison

Conversations

By: Toni Morrison

Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and other novels

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300

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Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1604730196

ISBN 13

9781604730197

Conversations with Toni Morrison

By: Toni Morrison

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Conversations with Toni Morrison

By: Toni Morrison

Collected interviews with the Nobel Prize winner in which she describes herself as an African American writer and that show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience

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316

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Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0878056920

ISBN 13

9780878056927

The Dancing Mind

By: Toni Morrison

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The Dancing Mind

By: Toni Morrison

On the occasion of her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the sixth of November, 1996, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison speaks with brevity and passion to the pleasures, the difficulties, the necessities, of the reading/writing life in our time. "She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truthteller." —Oprah Winfrey

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Vintage

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ISBN 10

0307388093

ISBN 13

9780307388094

Beloved

By: Toni Morrison

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Beloved

By: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.

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289

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Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0394535979

ISBN 13

9780394535975

Paradise

By: Toni Morrison

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Paradise

By: Toni Morrison

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

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338

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804169888

ISBN 13

9780804169882

Recitatif

A Story

By: Toni Morrison

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Recitatif

A Story

By: Toni Morrison

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner—for the first time in a beautifully produced stand-alone edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith “A puzzle of a story, then—a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an ‘experiment’ she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.” —Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.

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Knopf

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ISBN 10

0593315049

ISBN 13

9780593315040

Sula

By: Toni Morrison

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Sula

By: Toni Morrison

As girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's discoveries and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. SULA is the

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Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0099760010

ISBN 13

9780099760016

The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison

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The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • 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 subtly and grace. 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. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).

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225

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Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0375411550

ISBN 13

9780375411557

Song of Solomon

By: Toni Morrison

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Song of Solomon

By: Toni Morrison

Macon Dead, Jr., called "Milkman," the son of the wealthiest African American in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

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337

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Vintage

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ISBN 10

140003342X

ISBN 13

9781400033423

Song of Solomon

A Novel

By: Toni Morrison

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Song of Solomon

A Novel

By: Toni Morrison

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world. “Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.” —The New Yorker

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354

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Vintage

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ISBN 10

0307388123

ISBN 13

9780307388124

A Mercy

By: Toni Morrison

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A Mercy

By: Toni Morrison

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

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210

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

030737307X

ISBN 13

9780307373076

Jazz

By: Toni Morrison

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Jazz

By: Toni Morrison

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review

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258

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307388107

ISBN 13

9780307388100

God Help the Child

By: Toni Morrison

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God Help the Child

By: Toni Morrison

The new novel from the author of Beloved The past has a hold like no other... Sweetness wants to love her child, Bride, but she struggles to love her as a mother should. Bride, now glamorous, grown up, ebony-black and panther-like, wants to love her man, Booker, but she finds herself betrayed by a moment in her past, a moment borne of a desperate burn for the love of her mother. Booker cannot fathom Bride's depths, with his own love-lorn past bending him out of shape. Can they find a way through the damage wrought on their blameless childhood souls, to light and happiness, free from pain? Toni Morrison's fierce and provocative new novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations.

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194

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0099555921

ISBN 13

9780099555926

Beloved

By: Toni Morrison

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Beloved

By: Toni Morrison

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistantly haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.

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338

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Plume

Published Date

ISBN 10

045225230X

ISBN 13

9780452252301

Tar Baby

By: Toni Morrison

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Tar Baby

By: Toni Morrison

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

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343

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307388158

ISBN 13

9780307388155

Toni Morrison

Conversations

By: Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison

Conversations

By: Toni Morrison

Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and other novels

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300

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Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1604730196

ISBN 13

9781604730197

A Toni Morrison Treasury

The Big Box; The Ant Or the Grasshopper?; The Lion Or the Mouse?; Poppy Or the Snake?; Peeny Butter Fudge; The Tortoise Or the Hare; Little Cloud and Lady Wind; Please, Louise

By: Toni Morrison,Slade Morrison

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A Toni Morrison Treasury

The Big Box; The Ant Or the Grasshopper?; The Lion Or the Mouse?; Poppy Or the Snake?; Peeny Butter Fudge; The Tortoise Or the Hare; Little Cloud and Lady Wind; Please, Louise

By: Toni Morrison,Slade Morrison

A collection of eight children's books by Toni Morrison, which includes retellings of some of Aesop's fables as well as stories of friendship and imagination.

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304

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1665915544

ISBN 13

9781665915540

Conversations with Toni Morrison

By: Toni Morrison

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Conversations with Toni Morrison

By: Toni Morrison

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316

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

0878056920

ISBN 13

9780878056927

Desdemona

By: Toni Morrison

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Desdemona

By: Toni Morrison

This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work.' The Guardian Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy. Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining of the fourth act of Shakespeare's Othello, mixing monologue with Rokia Traore's lyrical songs to re-examine the Bard's presentation of race and female suffering. Part-play, part-concert, part-quest into the afterlife, Desdemona is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, featuring a new introduction by Joyce Green MacDonald.

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Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

135042899X

ISBN 13

9781350428997

Race

By: Toni Morrison

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Race

By: Toni Morrison

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.Includes selections from the books Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Belovedby Toni MorrisonVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Sisters by Louisa May AlcottLove by Jeanette WintersonBabiesby Anne EnrightLanguageby Xiaolu Guo

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131

Publisher

Arrow

Published Date

ISBN 10

1784872776

ISBN 13

9781784872779

The Origin of Others

By: Toni Morrison

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The Origin of Others

By: Toni Morrison

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates -- 1. Romancing Slavery -- 2. Being or Becoming the Stranger -- 3. The Color Fetish -- 4. Configurations of Blackness -- 5. Narrating the Other -- 6. The Foreigner's Home -- Acknowledgments

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116

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674982622

ISBN 13

9780674982628

Beloved

Pulitzer Prize Winner

By: Toni Morrison

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Beloved

Pulitzer Prize Winner

By: Toni Morrison

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful 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. “A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

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354

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

030738862X

ISBN 13

9780307388629

The Source of Self-Regard

Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

By: Toni Morrison

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The Source of Self-Regard

Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

By: Toni Morrison

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

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370

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525562796

ISBN 13

9780525562795

Home

By: Toni Morrison

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Home

By: Toni Morrison

The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--

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145

Publisher

Knopf Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307399729

ISBN 13

9780307399724

Playing in the Dark

By: Toni Morrison

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Playing in the Dark

By: Toni Morrison

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307388638

ISBN 13

9780307388636

Goodness and the Literary Imagination

Harvard's 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision

By: Toni Morrison

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Goodness and the Literary Imagination

Harvard's 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison's Moral and Religious Vision

By: Toni Morrison

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

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297

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813943639

ISBN 13

9780813943633

What Moves at the Margin

Selected Nonfiction

By: Toni Morrison

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What Moves at the Margin

Selected Nonfiction

By: Toni Morrison

Collecting three decades of Morrison's writings about her work, life, literature, and American society, this collection provides a unique glimpse into her viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.

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Page Count

252

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

160473017X

ISBN 13

9781604730173

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