Toni Morrison
1) Beloved
Author
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 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
Language
English
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
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...
4) Home
Author
Language
English
Description
"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
5) A mercy
Author
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
Everyman's library volume 216
Language
English
Description
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 GarcÃa Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
7) Love
Author
Language
English
Description
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a spellbinding symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of Black women in a fading beach town.
“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything...
“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything...
8) Paradise
Author
Language
English
Description
As the novel begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby assault the nearby Convent and the women in it.
This is a story of people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
9) Sula
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their...
10) Jazz
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The deep bluesy sadness of this novel wails out of the pages as expressively as a saxophone," writes Digby Diehl of Toni Morrison's 1993 novel. Set in 1926, at the height of the Harlem renaissance, it follows the lives of the Joe and Violet Vace, who have moved from the South to escape the hardships of segregation. They find a city throbbing with the music that represents both artistic freedom and moral decline. Jazz is story of passion, jealousy,...
11) Tar baby
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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 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....
Author
Language
English
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...
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Pub. Date
2017.
Physical Desc
xvii, 114 pages ; 19 cm.
Language
English
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
The 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 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. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested...
15) Please, Louise
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Physical Desc
1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 26 cm
Language
English
Description
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.
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Physical Desc
1 volume (unpaged) : chiefly illustrations (colour) ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
"Offers a humorous and insightful look at how children experience meanness and anger in our world...To a child, meanness can have many shapes, sizes, and sounds. The wise young narrator shows that meanness can be a whisper or a shout, a smile or a frown as the list of mean people grows to include parents, siblings, and bullies of several varieties"--
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
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...
Author
Pub. Date
[2010]
Physical Desc
32 unnumbered pages : color illustrations ; 27 cm
Language
English
Description
Little Cloud does not want to join the other clouds in terrorizing the earth with storms, but grows lonely and longs to look closer at mountains and seas, until Lady Wind makes her dream come true.