Toni Morrison

A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida â?? even L â?? all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey.

'This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work.' The GuardianRipped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy.Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining of the fourth act of Shakespeare's Othello, mixing monologue with Rokia Traore's lyrical songs to re-examine the Bard's presentation of race and female suffering.Part-play, part-concert, part-quest into the afterlife, Desdemona is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, featuring a new introduction by Joyce Green MacDonald.

A library card unlocks a new life for a young girl in this picture book about the power of imagination, from Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison.On one gray afternoon, Louise makes a trip to the library. With the help of a new library card and through the transformative power of books, what started out as a dull day turns into one of surprises, ideas, and imagination! Inspired by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison’s experience working in a library as a young girl, this engaging picture book celebrates the wonders of reading, the enchanting capacity of the imagination, and, of course, the splendor of libraries.

On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens' life changes irrevocably. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck.

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom--a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma's girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime--until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula's anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?

As 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. This is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend.

Älskade är berättelsen om Sethe och är en sällsam och dramatisk skildring av en svart kvinna som flyr från Kentucky till Ohio för att undkomma slaveriet. Men hon blir aldrig fri. Hon plågas ständigt av minnen från det förflutna och hemsöks av sin dotter, som dog utan att ha hunnit få ett namn. På dotterns gravsten står endast ett ord: Älskade. ”Älskade” är Toni Morrisons kanske mest hyllade verk som med stor svärta skildrar den amerikanska söderns slavsystem. Romanen belönades med Pulitzerpriset 1988. Morrison tilldelades Nobelpriset 1993 och var den första svarta kvinnliga Nobelpristagaren i litteratur. "En självlysande och förtrollad bok. Den äger mytens styrka och kraft och är en sällsynt märklig roman." New York Times

Harlem, 1926. En svart medelålders man dödar sin unga älskarinna, och vid flickans begravning tappar hans fru Violet fattningen inför alla församlade. Händelsen blir utgångspunkten för en berättelse som rör sig mellan nutid och förflutet, stad och landsbygd, när Violet ser tillbaka på sin och makens resa från amerikanska södern till det vibrerande New York. I ”Jazz” skildras Harlemrenässansen i ljuset av den stora migrationen av afroamerikaner i början av 1900-talet. Romanen utmärks av Toni Morrisons särpräglade flerstämmiga berättarteknik. Toni Morrison tilldelades Nobelpriset 1993 och var den första svarta kvinnliga Nobelpristagaren i litteratur.

I en liten industristad i Ohio drömmer den svarta flickan Pecola om att få blå ögon, övertygad om att vithet är lika med skönhet. Hon lever i ett hem präglat av våld och misär, i ett 1940-tal besatt av vita skönhetsnormer. Ställd inför rasism, självhat och en vuxenvärld som sviker, växer hennes önskan till något desperat och förödande. ”De blåaste ögonen” är Toni Morrisons debutroman och en stark uppväxtskildring som berör internaliserad rasism och svart identitet. I USA har romanen både hyllats och varit föremål för kontrovers, då den ofta toppar listor över bannlysta böcker. Morrison tilldelades Nobelpriset 1993 och var den första svarta kvinnliga Nobelpristagaren i litteratur.

Macon ”Milkman” Dead växer upp i Michigan, i ett känslokallt hem där man inte pratar om det förflutna. När han får höra talas om ett gömt guld som en gång splittrade familjen, ger han sig av söderut för att söka svar. Resan för honom till platser som bär spår av hans svarta släkt och där gamla berättelser om motstånd och förlorade namn ännu lever kvar. I ”Solomons sång” väver Toni Morrison samman slaveriets arv, muntliga traditioner och kollektivt minne till en gripande berättelse om ursprung och tillhörighet. Romanen belönades med National Book Critics Circle Award 1977. Morrison tilldelades Nobelpriset 1993 och var den första svarta kvinnliga Nobelpristagaren i litteratur.

Collected in one astonishing volume, Toni Morrison's explorations of Blackness and the American literary canon Perhaps no novelist has meant more to contemporary fiction than Toni Morrison. And in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Morrison spent 17 years as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching courses in African American studies, creative writing, and American literature. Now, for the first time ever, Morrison's lectures on the American canon are compiled together, granting readers unprecedented access to Morrison's scholarship, critical eye, and relentless brilliance. Researching several of America's most famous works and authors, Morrison illuminates the relationship between race, the arts, and life beyond the page. From Herman Melville's Moby Dick to Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the works of Faulkner and Hemmingway, Morrison interrogates major works of American literature as only she can. With an introduction from Morrison's colleague, Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory book that once again displays Morrison's intellectual and literary greatness.

The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination, which is bound up with memory. Showing how she explores two worlds, the actual and the possible, she follows the journey of an image from picture to meaning to text via the nimbus of emotion surrounding it.Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge.If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.