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(0)Toni Morrison
1) Beloved
Author
Lexile Measure
870L
Appears on these lists
Summary
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 and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
920L
Appears on list
Summary
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...
3) Sula
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1050L
Summary
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
870L
Summary
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
5) A mercy
Author
Summary
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, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America.
Author
Summary
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...
8) Tar baby
Author
Series
Summary
A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner
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...
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...
9) Love
Author
Summary
The late Bill Cosey, one-time owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, a hot spot for vacationing African-Americans, is kept alive through the memories of the women he loved and who were loved by him.
10) Jazz
Author
Lexile Measure
980L
Summary
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.
“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation....
“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation....
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Summary
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.
"One of the most celebrated and revered writers in the history of American literature gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The...
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Pub. Date
2017.
Summary
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Appears on these lists
Formats
Summary
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.
14) Paradise
Author
Series
Summary
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins
Author
Pub. Date
2007
Formats
Summary
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...
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...
Author
Pub. Date
©1987
Summary
Three in one novel.
Song of Solomon : Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family?s origins, Morrison...
17) Please, Louise
Author
Pub. Date
c2014
Summary
On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.
19) The Black book
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Summary
Now in a deluxe 35th anniversary hardcover edition, "The Black Book" remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Features a new Foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison.
Pub. Date
2019
Summary
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.
