Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye 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 blond white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty as the novel moves toward a savage but poignant resolution. Reversion from Picador.

Begins in 1930s America with Macon Dead Jr, the son of a wealthy black property owner, who has been brought up to revere the white world. Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group of poor blacks, Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure.

Paratiisi, jolle Morrison itse olisi halunnut antaa nimeksi War (Sota), alkaa väkivaltaisesta kohtauksesta Oklahoman sydänmailla eräänä aamuna vuonna 1976. Siellä on pieni Rubyn kaupunki, jonka vapautettujen orjien puritaaniset jälkeläiset ovat perustaneet. He ylpeilevät hyveillään, nöyryydellä, vaatimattomuudella ja jumalanpelolla, mutta vähitellen ristiriidat nousevat esiin sekä eri sukujen että ennen kaikkea sukupolvien välillä. Kaupungin laidalla on entinen luostari, josta muutama kovia kokenut nainen on hakenut turvaa. Mutta Rubyn miehille nämä naiset edustavat ulkomaailman viettelyksiä ja turmelusta. Lopulta konflikti on väistämätön. Tästä asetelmasta Morrison rakentaa monikerroksisen mysteerin lomittamalla naisten elämänvaiheet Rubyn "perustajaperheiden" historiaan. Naisista jokainen olennoi jotakin tuon kuohuvan ajan ilmiötä: kansalaisoikeustaitelua, Vietnamin sotaa, vastakulttuuria, sukupolvien vastakohtaisuutta. Heidän draamansa -- samoin kuin Rubyn konservatiivisten liikemiesten, kansalaisoikeuliikkeessä toimivan pastorin ja kolmen sodan veteraanien -- manaa esiin Amerikan yhteiskuntaa riivanneet ristiriidat: perinteisen ja uudenaikaisen välillä, isänvallan ja äidinvallan, rodun ja roduttomuuden, yhteisön ja yksilöllisyyden, laitosuskonnon ja spontaanin magian, yksiavioisuuden ja seksuaalisen vapauden välillä. Vuonna 2019 kuollut Toni Morrison oli Yhdysvaltain tärkeimpiä kirjailijoita. Morrisonille myönnettiin kymmeniä palkintoja, muun muassa Pulitzer-palkinto romaanista Minun kansani, minun rakkaani. Hän oli myös ensimmäinen musta nainen ja ensimmäinen musta amerikkalainen, joka sai Nobelin kirjallisuuspalkinnon.

An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian â?? a black American now living in Paris and Rome.

Discover Toni Morrison's most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature.'An American masterpiece' AS ByattIt is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece.'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours..." Beloved," is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times'The literary titan we must never stop learning from' MetroWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction. "Song of Solomon" begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch. (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

This is the story of Macon 'Milkman' Dead, heir to the richest black family in a midwestern town, as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spirituality. Through the enlightenment of one man the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME - From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature--from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Romaani suoraan mustan Amerikan sydämestä – kirja joka on saanut koko Yhdysvallat - ja nyt koko maailman - haltioihinsa. On 1920-luku, jazzin aika, New Yorkin Harlemissa. Joe Trace, viisikymppinen kosmetiikan ovelta ovelle-myyjä, on elänyt kiihkeän rakkaustarinan 18-vuotiaan Dorcasin kanssa ja ampunut hänet mustasukkaisuuden puuskassa. Joen vaimo Violet, kotikampaaja joka on alkanut kaivata lasta nyt kun se on jo liian myöhäistä, ryntää hautajaisissa viiltelemään vainajan kasvoja. Sen jälkeen hänet tunnetaan naapurustossa nimellä Violent. Siinä on kirjan tarina, kaikessa lyhykäisyydessään. Mutta siinä ei toki ole koko romaani. Jazzia ei kirjassa mainita, mutta koko ajan taustalla soi tuo syntinen, aistillinen musiikki, joka tuntuu koko ruumissa ja vie ajatuksetkin mukanaan. Sen tahtiin, kuin improvisoiden, kertoo salaperäinen ääni Joen, Violetin ja Dorcasin tarinan, joka tempaa lukijan menneisyyteen ja taas takaisin, vie hänet Virginian puuvillapelloille, mistä Joe ja Violet nuorina lähtivät Kaupunkiin tanssien koko junamatkan ajan, ja kuvaa heidän vanhempiensa ankeata elämää, jossa näkyi vielä orjuuden poltinmerkki. Tuo ääni kutoo yhteen historian, legendat ja muistot ja tavoittaa sen sanoinkuvaamattoman tunnelman, joka mielessämme liittyy mustien elämään kaupungissa ja tuohon musiikkiin, joka tuntuu nousevan suoraan heidän sielustaan. Vuonna 2019 kuollut Toni Morrison oli Yhdysvaltain tärkeimpiä kirjailijoita. Morrisonille myönnettiin kymmeniä palkintoja, muun muassa Pulitzer-palkinto romaanista Minun kansani, minun rakkaani. Hän oli myös ensimmäinen musta nainen ja ensimmäinen musta amerikkalainen, joka sai Nobelin kirjallisuuspalkinnon.

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.

It was perhaps the most wretchedly aspersive race and gender scandal of recent times: the dramatic testimony of Anita Hill at the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Yet even as the televised proceedings shocked and galvanized viewers not only in this country but the world over, they cast a long shadow on essential issues that define America. In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together eighteen provocative essays, all but one written especially for this book, by prominent and distinguished academicians--Black and white, male and female. These writings powerfully elucidate not only the racial and sexual but also the historical, political, cultural, legal, psychological, and linguistic aspects of a signal and revelatory moment in American history. With contributions by: Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberl Crenshaw, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol M. Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to “put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature…draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.” Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Tervanuken keskeisenä tapahtumapaikkana on Karibianmeren saari, jonne amerikkalainen makeismiljonääri Valerian Street on vetäytynyt viettämään eläkevuosiaan. Hänen lisäkseen talossa asuvat vain hänen kaksikymmentä vuotta nuorempi vaimonsa Margaret, entinen "Mainen johtava kaunotar", ja uskollinen palvelijapariskunta Sidney ja Ondine. Taloon päätyy ilmaantumaan odottamattoman tapahtuman laukaisema tukahtunut ilmapiiri: sinne murtautuu karkuteillä oleva mies, Son. Valerian Streetin mielijohteesta Sonia ei ajeta pois, vaan hänet kutsutaan perheen toiseksi vieraaksi, Ondinen kauniin veljentyttären, Jadinen lisäksi. Kansikuvamalli Jadine hylkeennahkaturkkeineen ja rääsyinen ja aggressiivinen Son edustavat kahta äärimmäisyyttä mustan amerikkalaisen asteikossa. Siitä huolimatta väistämätön tapahtuu. Son ja Jadine rakastuvat toisiinsa ja lähtevät yhdessä saarelta. Ensin Sonin kotiseudulla floridalaisessa kaupunkipahasessa ja sitten Jadinen eksklusiivisessa newyorkilaispiireissä he kamppailevat turhaan ylittääkseen heit erottavan kuilun. Jadinelle Son edustaa sitä alennustilaa josta hänen perheensä on ponnistellut ylös. Sonin mielestä Jadine on irronnut juuriltaan ja antautunut valkoisten sopeutettavaksi. Tervanukke on vangitseva, aistillista tunnelmaa väreilevä teos, jonka syvät ja rikkaat jännitteet syntyvät myyttien ja nykyajan, miehen ja naisen, mustan ja valkoisen vastakohta-asetelmista. Vuonna 2019 kuollut Toni Morrison oli Yhdysvaltain tärkeimpiä kirjailijoita. Morrisonille myönnettiin kymmeniä palkintoja, muun muassa Pulitzer-palkinto romaanista Minun kansani, minun rakkaani. Hän oli myös ensimmäinen musta nainen ja ensimmäinen musta amerikkalainen, joka sai Nobelin kirjallisuuspalkinnon.

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. The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years--the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife--who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them--a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant's dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art. Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him--he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege. As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward--to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them--she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him--all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart. Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.