Toni Morrison
Author
Language
English
Description
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child -- the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment -- weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest...
2) Beloved
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old 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 the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow 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.--From...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.00The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer...
7) Jazz
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Violet and Joe Trace, a black couple who left Vesper County, VA in 1926 find twenty years later that they are without words or ambition. Their child was loved then murdered by Joe, defamed then maimed by Violet. As Joe and Violet search for the reality of who their daughter was, they arrive at a quiet but powerful redemption.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. After losing touch, they meet several times by accident. Seemingly...
10) A mercy
Author
Physical Desc
167 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love -- first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Physical Desc
xvii, 114 pages ; 19 cm.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...
12) Tar baby
Author
Physical Desc
xiii, 305 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
A beautiful African-American woman of privilege finds herself attracted to the kind of man she has dreaded since childhood: uneducated, violent, and contemptuous of her.
Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction. "Beautiful and satisfying ... an unusually wise and large-spirited book ... consistently picturesque, charged with startling images".--Baltimore Sun.
"Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is...
Author
Physical Desc
viii, 129 pages ; 18 cm
Language
English
Description
"This inspirational book juxtaposes quotations, one to a page, drawn from Toni Morrison's entire body of work, both fiction and nonfiction -- from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, from Playing in the Dark to The Source of Self-Regard -- to tell a story of self-actualization. It aims to evoke the totality of Toni Morrison's literary vision. Its sequence of flashes of revelation -- remarkable for their linguistic felicity, keenness of psychological...
15) Paraíso
Author
Physical Desc
397 pages ; 20 cm
Language
Español
Description
"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,...
Physical Desc
vi, 118 pages ; 21 cm
Language
English
Description
From the Publisher: 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.
Series
Ingersoll lecture volume 2012
Physical Desc
viii, 262 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Language
English
Description
"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...
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (120 min.) : sound, color with black and white sequences ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
An artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of the acclaimed novelist. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to '70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics, and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition as seen through the prism of her own literature.
20) Beloved
Series
Baruch video volume DVD 1777
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (171 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved". Sethe & Denver take her in and then strange things start to happen.