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Toni  Morrison  

 

Beloved	Editorial Reviews Amazon.com      In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
The Bluest Eye	Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, April 2000:          Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Song of Solomon	Editorial Reviews Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, October 1996: In an effort to hide his Southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black businessman, tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman"--a named he earned after his mother nursed him well past the proper age--onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped. Milkman is driven into the arms of a violent, lower-class woman, into a clandestine circle of blacks who repay white violence in kind and into an awareness that he can fulfill his own potential by understanding the mistakes of his ancestors as they relate to his own
The Big Box	From Booklist August 19, 1999 "Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy." Wordsworth's famous line could be the theme of Morrison's first picture book, coauthored by her son, who "devised" the story when he was nine. It's about three contemporary kids imprisoned because their imagination and spontaneity threaten the conformist adult world. Patty's a rebel in the classroom; she makes the heavy-browed, therapeutic grown-ups nervous. Mickey upsets his city neighborhood. Liza frees the animals on the farm....
Jazz (Plume Contemporary Fiction)	Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Jazz embraces the vibrant music and lifestyle of 1920s Harlem, an urban renaissance of opportunity and glamour. A novel of murder, hard lives, and broken dreams, Jazz sways with a lyric medley of voices and human consciousness.
Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the...	Synopsis A Pulitzer Prize-winning author illuminates the "Africanist" presence shaping the American imagination in a landmark work of literary criticism. "Morrison challenge(s) some of the most widely accepted generalizations about our literary history."--San Francisco Chronicle.
Tar Baby	Editorial Reviews Book Description The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
Sula	Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Toni Morrison's highly acclaimed novel Sula is as gripping on audiotape as it is on paper. The Nobel Prize-winning writer narrates the unabridged version of the book in a rich, soothing voice that mesmerizes listeners with its relaxed and methodical cadence. Sula revolves around the relationship between two little girls growing up in a poor, black neighborhood nestled high in the hilltops.
Paradise	Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, January 1998: "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun." So begins Paradise, Toni Morrison's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

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  04/06/03