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Showing 1 - 13 of 13 items
The bluest eye (Picador Bks.)
By Toni Morrison. 1994
This book chronicles the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in 1940s Ohio: Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola.…
Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty. 1994.Tar baby
By Toni Morrison. 1983
Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion come Jadine - graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian, an American black now living…
in Paris and Rome - and Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous, an American black from small-town Florida. Son is a threat to her freedom; she is a threat to his identity. Strong language. 1983.Paradise
By Toni Morrison. 1998
In 1976, nine men from the all-black community of Ruby, Oklahoma attack a former convent on the edge of town,…
which is the refuge of four female outcasts. Various tragedies that have struck the townspeople motivate the assault, which is intended to purge and protect the community. But it also reveals dark secrets leading back to the town's origins in the 1890's. Bestseller. Some descriptions of sex, some violence, and some strong language. 1998.God help the child
By Toni Morrison. 2015
A searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the centre: a…
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 forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish. Bestseller. 2015.Paradise
By Toni Morrison. 1999
In 1976, nine men from the all-black community of Ruby, Oklahoma attack a former convent on the edge of town,…
which is the refuge of four female outcasts. Various tragedies that have struck the townspeople motivate the assault, which is intended to purge and protect the community. But it also reveals dark secrets leading back to the town's origins in the 1890's. Bestseller. Some descriptions of sex, some violence, and some strong language.Jazz
By Toni Morrison. 1992
The story of Violet and Joe Trace, married for over 20 years, residents of Harlem in 1926. When Joe shoots…
his 18-year-old lover, Violet disfigures the girl's body at her funeral. As Joe mourns, Violet becomes obsessed with the lovers' relationship. Past and present voices, like jazz, quietly sing the blues. Some strong language. Bestseller 1992.Sula
By Toni Morrison. 2002
Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard…
said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."Sula has the same power, the same beauty.At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.Through their girlhood years they share everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped. Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks--where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years ago...that there was a plague of robins when she first returned...In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.Recitatif: A story
By Toni Morrison. 2022
A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner—…
for the first time in a beautifully produced stand-alone edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith &“A puzzle of a story, then—a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an &‘experiment&’ she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.&” —Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif , a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing timesA mercy
By Toni Morrison. 2008
Colonial North America, 1680s. An Anglo-Dutch trader reluctantly accepts a young slave girl named Florens as payment for a bad…
debt. Her mother hopes the transaction will prove a mercy to Florens, but subsequent years in Jacob Vaark's household reveal the harsh reality of being under another's dominion. Some violence. Bestseller. 2008The bluest eye
By Toni Morrison. 1993
1941. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--poor, ugly, and black--desperately wants blue eyes, which she thinks would solve all her problems. But instead…
she is subjected to rejection, violence, and an unwanted pregnancy. Slowly, she begins to descend into madness. Strong language and some explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller. 1970Beloved: a novel (Vintage International)
By Toni Morrison. 1987
Related in kaleidoscopic fashion and set in rural Ohio during the period immediately following the Civil War, this chronicle of…
slavery and its aftermath traces the life of Sethe, a former slave. Sethe has a secret in her past so horrific that it has alienated the community, driven off her two sons, isolated her surviving daughter, and threatened her new, loving relationship with Paul D., also a former slave. Bestseller 1987. Some violenceJazz (Plume Ser.)
By Toni Morrison. 1992
The story of Violet and Joe Trace, married for over 20 years, residents of Harlem in 1926. When Joe shoots…
his 18-year-old lover, Violet disfigures the girl's body at her funeral. As Joe mourns, Violet becomes obsessed with the lovers' relationship. Past and present voices, like jazz, quietly sing the blues. Some strong language.Tar baby (Vintage International)
By Toni Morrison. 2004
Son, a black fugitive, invades the West Indian home of a retired millionaire, upsetting the racially diverse household. He captivates…
pampered Jadine, a black fashion model. Their ideologically complicated love affair plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan. 2004 foreword by the author. Strong language. 1981