Toni Morrison (SC)

The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who 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.

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.

This novel reates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world readers enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr.; the day on which lonely Robert Smith attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward.

Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. 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.-- from book jacket

Proud and beautiful, Sethe escaped from slavery but is haunted by its heritage--from the fires of the flesh to the heartbreaking challenges to the spirit. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest work. Unabridged. 11 CDs.

Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel, "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.

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.

This audacious exploration into the nature of love and its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread;is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be. A major addition to the canon of one of the world's literary masters.

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 book jacket

America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.

The story of Desdemona from Shakespeare's Othello is re-imagined by Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison.

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."

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.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofBelovedandJazznow gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race. -- From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Nobel Prize author discusses her life & such acclaimed works as Sula, Tar Baby, & Beloved.

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.

"Recalling this tumultuous time, Toni Morrison has collected archival photographs that depict the events surrounding school integration. These unforgettable images serve as the inspiration for Professor Morrison's text - a fictional account of the dialogue and emotions of the students who lived during the era of change in separate-but-equal schooling. Remember offers a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history and its relevance today."-- from the book jacket

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.

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. -- from the publisher

A new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin.

To make three youngsters who "can't handle their freedom" 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. From Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison comes her first illustrated book featuring wonderful, lyrical prose for young readers.

Illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre. For all ages The second in a series of six illustrated books retelling Aesop's fables in a hip and lively manner, this book is a deft and witty send-up of a culture that sucks up to anyone with the trappings of power.

"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 listeners of all ages.

Written by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and her son Slade Morrison, Pascal Lemaitre's ingenious illustrations add a wry sophistication to this already vibrant and defiantly ambiguous book. 'In our versions', says Toni Morrison, 'the original stories are opened up and their moralistic endings re-imagined: The victim might not loose; the timid gets a chance to become strong; the fool can gain insight; the powerful may lose their grip. Anything can happen. For All Ages.

Illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre. Toni Morrison's second picture book written with her son, Slade Morrison, offers a humorous look at how children interpret daily events. Sometimes people are mean intentionally, sometimes not.