Toni Morrison Books

A box set of Toni Morrison's principal works, featuring The Bluest Eye (her first novel), Beloved (Pulitzer Prize winner), and Song of Solomon (National Book Critics Award winner). Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, Beloved transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. This spellbinding novel tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who escapes to Ohio, but eighteen years later is still not free. In The New York Times bestselling novel, The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty and yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes, that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. With Song of Solomon, Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as she follows Milkman Dead from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, introducing an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. This beautifully designed slipcase will make the perfect holiday and perennial gift.

“Knowledge is what’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.” — TONI MORRISON In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a “national treasure”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South. With an introduction by her close friend, poet Nikki Giovani, Morrison hereby weaves yet another fascinating and inspiring narrative — that of herself.

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?

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.

Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal enquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a pre-eminent place among modern novelists, Playing in the Dark provides a daring new perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. ‘Morrison’s reflections are vital not simply to conceptions of racial identity but also to those of American literary production . . . In these essays she examines “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” . . . Morrison’s daring – as a writer, a black woman – in addressing the issue in contemporary America is a measure of her integrity and courage’ Claire Messud, Guardian ‘The significance lies in the many permutations that her dazzling prose is able to work on the idea of white America’s “self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated, mythological Africanism” . . . Playing in the Dark is less a book for scholars than for the broad reading public – or those scholars, it should be added, who still doubt that race has been, and remains, a pervasive topic in the American imagination’ Eric J. Sundquist, Virginia Quarterly Review ‘Morrison’s real accomplishment is to recall the work of the true pioneers who first approached questions about race and imagination with urgency and rigorous open-mindedness’ New Republic

Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. The collection is structured in three parts and these are introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin

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.

THE BLUEST EYE chronicles the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in 1940s Ohio: Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola. Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged blond white schoolfellows. She becomes the fo

This is the story of Macon Dead as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spiritually. Through the enlightenment of one man, the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

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. This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years 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