Toni Morrison Books In Order

Who’s Got Game? Books In Publication Order

  1. Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003)
  2. Who’s Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? (2003)
  3. Who’s Got Game? Three Fables (2003)
  4. Who’s Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? (2004)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Bluest Eye (1970)
  2. Sula (1973)
  3. Song of Solomon (1977)
  4. Tar Baby (1981)
  5. Beloved (1987)
  6. Jazz (1992)
  7. Paradise (1997)
  8. Love (2003)
  9. A Mercy (2008)
  10. Home (2011)
  11. God Help the Child (2014)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Recitatif (1983)
  2. Race (2017)

Chapbooks In Publication Order

  1. The Big Box (1999)
  2. The Book of Mean People (2002)
  3. The Mirror Or The Glass? (2005)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
  2. Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010)
  3. The Tortoise or the Hare (2010)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. Desdemona (2012)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Playing in the Dark (1992)
  2. Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1992)
  3. The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993 (1994)
  4. Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994)
  5. The Dancing Mind (1996)
  6. Birth of a Nation’hood (1997)
  7. Memoirs (1999)
  8. Remember (2004)
  9. What Moves at the Margin (2008)
  10. Burn This Book (2009)
  11. To Die for the People (2009)
  12. Please, Louise (2013)
  13. The Origin of Others (2016)
  14. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019)
  15. Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019)
  16. Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019)
  17. The Writer Before the Page: From The Source of Self-Regard (2019)
  18. The Measure of Our Lives (2019)

Who’s Got Game? Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

ChapBook Covers

Picture Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Toni Morrison Books Overview

Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?

‘How can you say I never worked a day? ART is WORK. It just looks like play’ So says Foxy G to his buddy Kid A, in Toni and Slade Morrison’s sassy, sly tale of friendship, betrayal, and survival or not. Generation after generation, classic fables, folklore, and myth remain popular because they quicken the imagination of readers and listerners of all ages. We, the creators of Who’s Got Game? were inspired by the wonder of Aesop’s Fables their vitality, their endless demand for more interpretations. In our versions the original stories are opened up and their moralisitic endings reimagined; the victim might not lose; the timid gets a chance to become strong; the fool can gain insight; the powerful may lose their grip. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. More than a play on these beloved fables, Who’s Got Game? is AESOP LIVE!

Who’s Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse?

In this charmingly subversive reinterpretation of a classic tale, the Morrisons and Pascal Lemaitre take a hilarious look at bullying. The cocky lion, the self proclaimed ‘baddest in the land,’ believes himself invincible until he gets a thorn stuck in his paw. Only a weak little mouse can help him, but then the lion must indulge the mouse’s ridiculous pride and appetite for power. We, the creators of Who’s Got Game?, were inspired by the wonder of Aesop’s Fables their vitality, their endless demand for new interpretations. In our versions the original stories are opened and their moralistic endings reimagined: the victim might not lose; the timid gets a chance to become strong; the foool can gain insight; the powerful may lose their grip. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. More than a play on these beloved fables, Who’s Got Game? is AESOP LIVE! ALL AGES

Who’s Got Game? Three Fables

Generation after generation, classic fables, folklore, and myth remain popular because they quicken the imagination of listeners of all ages.

We, the creators of Who’s Got Game?, were inspired by the wonder of Aaesop’s fables their vitality, their endless demand for new interpretations. In our versions the original stories are opened up and their moralistic endings re imagined: the victim might not lose; the timid get a chance to become strong; the fool can gain insight; the powerful may lose their grip. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. More than a play on these beloved fables, Who’s Got Game? is AESOP LIVE!

The Bluest Eye

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she 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. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

Sula

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye 1970, was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written as John Leonard said in The New York Times in a prose ‘so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.’Sula has the same power, the same beauty. At its center a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug ridden flour…
at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped. Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can’t understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks’ home the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance…
that a child drowned in the river years ago…
that there was a plague of robins when she first returned…
In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her. From the Hardcover edition.

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel of large beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world we enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. known as Milkman, son of the richest black family in a mid western town; the day on which the lonely insurance man, Robert Smith, poised in blue silk wings, attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward…
We see Milkman growing up in his father’s money haunted, death haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother, beginning to move outward through his profound love and combat with his friend Guitar…
through Guitar’s mad and loving commitment to the secret avengers called the Seven Days…
through Milkman’s exotic, imprisoning affair with his love blind cousin, Hagar…
and through his unconscious apprenticeship to his mystical Aunt Pilate, who saved his life before he was born. And we follow him as he strikes out alone; moving first toward adventure and then as the unspoken truth about his family and his own buried heritage announces itself toward an adventurous and crucial embrace of life. This is a novel that expresses, with passion, tenderness, and a magnificence of language, the mysterious primal essence of family bond and conflict, the feelings and experience of all people wanting, and striving, to be alive.

Tar Baby

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people. The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant’s dazzling niece, but the proteg e and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art. Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian’s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret’s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege. As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the Tar Baby set out to entrap him all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart. Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power. From the Hardcover edition.

Beloved

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.

Jazz

2 casettes / 3 hoursRead by Toni MorrisonFrom the author of Paraidse and Beloved, Jazz, is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style.’Morrison’s remarkable talent for storytelling naturally lends itself to the spoken word.’ The Arizona RepublicIt is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, ‘when all the wars are over and there will never be another one…
At last, at last, everything’s ahead…
Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things nobody could help stuff.’ But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise. Joe Trace in his fifties, door to door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen year old Dorcas ‘Everything was like a picture show to her’. At the funeral, his determined, hard working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. In a dazzling act of jazz like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice whose identity is a matter of each reader’s imagination weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood. Jazz is an unprecedented and astonishing invention, a landmark on the American literary landscape a novel unforgettable and for all time.

Paradise

Make it easy on yourself, read 1 bestselling author Toni Morrison in Large Print About Large PrintAll Random House Large Print editions are published in a 16 point typeface’Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed…
The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women.’In Paradise her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby pop. 360, in defense of ‘the one all black town worth the pain,’ assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town’s ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void ‘Out There…
where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose.’ Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Love

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial. This audacious vision of the nature of love its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be.A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters. This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence a kind of pitty kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can t hide the sugar child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. from LoveFrom the Hardcover edition.

A Mercy

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in flesh, he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved. There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences. From the Hardcover edition.

Home

The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. An angry and self loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home and himself in it may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he’s hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood and his home.

The Big Box

Here’s what happens when parents, teachers, and other adults try to determine the boundaries of personal freedom for a group of youngsters, ‘who just can’t handle their freedom.’ To make youngsters abide by their rules, the grown ups create a world inside a box. A world with toys and games, and treats and gifts, and all kinds of stuff they think children need to be happy and carefree everything from a picture of the sky to jelly beans and brand new jeans. All Patty and Mickey and Liza Sue really want is the freedom to be themselves. But even confined inside a box, these clever children find their own ways to be free.

The Book of Mean People

Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison returns with her son Slade for asecond kids book, this one a catalog of the ‘mean people’ in a young rabbit slife. The results, happily, make for much more fun than the Morrison duo sweirdly subtle The BigBox.’This is a book about mean people,’ begins our tiny hero, and almost immediatelywe realize that illustrator Pascal Lema tre is going to give cartoonist MattGroening a run for his money when it comes to goofily rendered rabbits. Each’mean’ person gets playful, exaggerated, kid perspective treatment fromLema tre, whether we re seeing a towering dad who barely fits onto two pages’Some mean people are big’ or a mother who’s using her nearly telescopic armto force veggies down our hero s throat ‘There are people who smile when theyare being mean’. The rabbit s ‘Mean People’ book gets assembled page by page,and no one is spared not grandparents, brothers, teachers, not even ababysitter with an alarm clock five times the size of her head. The Morrisons maintain some of their Big Box subtlety by begging thequestion of both kids and grownups of why and whether and which ofthese people are really ‘mean’ at all. Even young kids will see the differencebetween making somebody get out of bed in the morning and tearing the wings offa butterfly. Whatever the lesson, The Book of Mean People endsinevitably, triumphantly ‘I will smile anyway!’ with a joyous, naked plungeinto a flowery forest. ‘How about that!’ Ages 4 to 8 Paul Hughes

Peeny Butter Fudge

Snuggle, snuggle.
Time to rest.
Nana joins us in her nest.

There is no one like Nana in the whole wide world. She is the best. Nana knows how to take an ordinary afternoon and make it extra special! Nap time, story time, and playtime are transformed by fairies, dragons, dancing, and pretending and then mixing and fixing yummy, yummy fudge just like Nana and Mommy did not so many years ago…
.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison and her son Slade tell a story of what really goes on when Nana is left in charge!

Little Cloud and Lady Wind

Little Cloud drifts in the sky with the other clouds and has a life that any cloud would want. But Little Cloud isn’t happy. She doesn’t want to make thunder and rain like the other clouds. The earth below is so beautiful purple mountains, scarves of snow, silver topped waves. She wants to live and play on the earth and be on her own. How will Little Cloud ever come to understand that everything has its special place in the world, most especially her?Inspired by the favorite Aesop story ‘The Bundle of Sticks,’ Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison tell a gentle and loving tale that illustrates that the whole is far mightier than any single part. Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor recipient Sean Qualls’s shimmering paintings sparkle from the pages of this timeless fable.

Playing in the Dark

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to ‘put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature…
draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World without the mandate for conquest.’ Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power

It was perhaps the most wretchedly aspersive race and gender scandal of recent times: the dramatic testimony of Anita Hill at the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Yet even as the televised proceedings shocked and galvanized viewers not only in this country but the world over, they cast a long shadow on essential issues that define America. In Race ing Justice, En gendering Power, Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together eighteen provocative essays, all but one written especially for this book, by prominent and distinguished academicians black and white, male and female. These writings powerfully elucidate not only the racial and sexual but also the historical, political, cultural, legal, psychological, and linguistic aspects of a signal and revelatory moment in American history. With contributions by:Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberl Crenshaw, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol M. Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams

The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, reads the speech she delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.

Conversations with Toni Morrison

This is a collection of interviews, beginning in 1974, with Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison describes herself as an African American writer, and these essays show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience.

The Dancing Mind

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.

Birth of a Nation’hood

Co edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Birth of a Nation’hood elucidates as never before the grim miasma of the O.J. Simpson case, which has elicited gargantuan fascination. As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals black and white, male and female. Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend our society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair. With contributions by:Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberl Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour

Remember

Toni Morrison has collected a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation. These unforgettable images serve as the inspiration for Ms. Morrison’s text a fictional account of the dialogue and emotions of the children who lived during the era of separate but equal schooling. Remember is a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history and its relevance to us today. Remember will be published on the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending legal school segregation, handed down on May 17, 1954.

What Moves at the Margin

What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison’s writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison b. 1931 was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison’s viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ‘Family and History,’ includes Morrison’s writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ‘Writers and Writing,’ offers her as*sessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ‘Politics and Society,’ includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison’s Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature’s most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

Burn This Book

Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.

To Die for the People

Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black party and its chief theoretician, has long been a hero to radicals of every description. This new release of a classic collection of his writings and speeches traces the development of Newton’s personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party. With a rare and persuasive honesty. To Die for the People records the party’s internal struggles, rivalries and Contradictions, and the result is a fascinating look back at a young revolutionary group determined to find ways to deal with the injustice it saw in American society. And as a new foreword by Elaine Brown Makes eminently clear, Newton’s prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today. Here is the compelling portrait of a young revolutionary determined to create a People’s ethos to deal with injustice and cruelty. Newton has already taken his place in the history of this Country. His writings fix that place.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment