Toni Morrison

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...

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...

Unabridged.

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.

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...

Because they do not abide by the rules written by the adults around them, three children are judged unable to handle their freedom and forced to live in a box with three locks on the door.

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...

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...

"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...