Toni Morrison
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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.
From the Hardcover edition. -
Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together thirteenessays, all written especially for this book, by distinguished academics - black and white, male and female - on one of the grimmest and most revealing moments of American history: the O J Simpson case.
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Playing in the Dark
Toni Morrison
- Knopf doubleday publishing group digital
- 24 July 2007
- 9780307388636
The Nobel Prize-winning author now 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.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She 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 as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent 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.
"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."
--Chicago Tribune
"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."
The New York Times Book Review -
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDAn 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. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his shattered sense of self, he unearths the courage he thought he'd lost forever. It is with incantatory power that Morrison's language reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and, finally, his home.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDFour young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in America in the mid-1970s. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise. Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture and politics of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of the citizens of the town with astonishing clarity. Starkly evoking the clashes that have bedevilled the American century: between race and racelessness; religion and magic; promiscuity and fidelity; individuality and belonging.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDMay, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread - is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDAs young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDJoe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. 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 characterised her writing. She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That s why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them Afua Hirsch Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures Washington Post When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape Ben Okri Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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Song of Solomon is a work of outstanding beauty and power, whose story covers the years from the 1930's to the 1960's in America. At its centre is Macon Dead Jr, the son of a wealthy black property owner, who has been brought up to revere the white world. Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned to escape the tyranny of his father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group of poor blacks, Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. His journey leads to the discovery of something more valuable than gold, his past. Yet the truth about his origins and his true self is not fully revealed to Macon until he and Guitar meet once again in powerful, and deadly confrontation.
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Discover Toni Morrison s most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature. An American masterpiece AS ByattIt is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison s enduring masterpiece. Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours Beloved, is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all Margaret Atwood, New York Times The literary titan we must never stop learning from MetroWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**One of the BBC s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
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BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDInto a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian - a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there's Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous - a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
