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What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices,…
pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form.Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity.Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.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.Love
By Toni Morrison. 2004
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey's…
Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces, a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial. 2004.Délivrances
By Toni Morrison. 2015
Lula Ann Bridewell, fille de "mulâtres au teint blond", est si noire de peau à la naissance que sa mère,…
Sweetness, n'éprouve pour elle que du dégoût. Son père, ne la croyant pas de lui, quitte le domicile conjugal. Sweetness ("Douceur") élève durement - et sans jamais cacher sa répugnance - la fillette, prête à tout pour que sa mère daigne la toucher. C'est seulement quand Lula Ann fait un faux témoignage contre une institutrice accusée de pédophilie que Sweetness, fière qu'elle ait contribué à faire incarcérer une Blanche, lui prend la main. L'accusée est condamnée à vingt-cinq ans de prison. 2015.Beloved: a novel
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. Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 1987.A mercy
By Toni Morrison. 2009
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. Includes strong language. 2009.A 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. 2008.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.La chanson de Salomon
By Toni Morrison. 1985
Si ce roman semble centré sur le destin d'un jeune homme en mal d'adolescence, de son initiation amoureuse et sexuelle,…
de sa chasse aux lingots d'or abandonnés par son père, c'est avant tout l'opéra de l'esclavage, la résurrection des légendes africaines transmises de génération de génération. Quelques descriptions de nature sexuelle, quelques passages où le langage est grossier. 1985. Titre uniforme: Song of Solomon.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.Jazz
By Toni Morrison. 1993
En 1926, le coeur d'Harlem est en pleine ébullition. Le Jazz Age incarne la liberté d'une nouvelle génération de Noirs…
américains et sème sur la ville un air de folie. Joe, en proie au délire, assassine sa jeune maîtresse devant sa femme. Dans un accès de rage, celle-ci se jette à son tour sur la défunte pour lui taillader le visage. Bouleversé par sa propre violence, le couple va chercher dans son passé les traces de son présent ravagé. Quelques passages où le langage est grossier. 1993. Titre uniforme: Jazz.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.Home: A novel
By Toni Morrison. 2012
America’s most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of…
redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he’s hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood—and his home.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. 2008Love: A novel
By Toni Morrison. 2003
Even after the death of seaside resort owner Bill Cosey, his women--widow Heed, granddaughter Christine, and mistress Celestial--continue their feuds.…
These members of the town's African American former elite reminisce about the man they loved and hated. Strong language and some explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller. 2003Song of Solomon (Contemporary Fiction, Plume Ser.)
By Toni Morrison. 1987
This novel surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges upon four generations of a single black family.…
Macon Dead III, known as Milkman, is the first black baby allowed to be born in Mercy Hospital in the 1930s. Milkman undertakes an epic journey into an understanding of his family's heritage and, hence, himself. Strong language and descriptions of sex