Toni Morrison

Pecola Breedlove, a young 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 normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows 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, Toni...

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this 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 friendship ends in...

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh, " he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina,...

An anthology of the author's essays, speeches, and commentary on society, culture, and art includes her powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and her poignant eulogy for James Baldwin.

"In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged waiter who moonlights as a door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession ... brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities...

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away,...

"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. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation...

Grammy Award Nominee for Best Spoken Word Album!
Generation after generation, classic fables, folklore, and myth remain popular because they quicken the imagination of listeners of all ages.

We, the creators of Who's Got Game?, were inspired by the wonder of Aesop's fables — their vitality, their endless demand for new interpretations. In our versions the original stories are opened up and their moralistic endings...

"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 observation,...

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than sixty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished works feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled Book of Days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems.