Toni Morrison
1) Beloved
Author
Series
Lexile measure
870L
Language
English
Description
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose...
2) Home
Author
Language
English
Description
This book tells the story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister. Frank Money is an angry, broken 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. 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 that he's hated all...
Author
Series
Lexile measure
920L
Language
English
Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old 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 the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow 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. --...
4) Paradise
Author
Pub. Date
1998
Language
English
Formats
Description
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins
6) Sula
Author
Series
Lexile measure
1050L
Language
English
Formats
Description
At the heart of Sula is a bond between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they shared everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there is a fierce resentment toward those who step over the line of tradition and social exclusiveness. Ten years later, Nel is married with children...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Formats
Description
A tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young 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. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2022.
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
xliii, 39 pages ; 19 cm
Language
English
Description
In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2019.
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
ix, 354 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer...
12) A mercy
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Language
English
Description
In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.
Author
Pub. Date
2010
Lexile measure
AD 640L
Physical Desc
1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 26 cm
Language
English
Description
Jamey Tortoise is smarter than anyone else and Jimi Hare is faster, but when a race is announced each consults a reporter about how to get what he really wants when and if he should win in this updated twist on the familiar fable.
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Pub. Date
2017.
Physical Desc
xvii, 114 pages ; 19 cm.
Language
English
Description
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...
16) The big box
Author
Pub. Date
1999
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
42 unnumbered pages : color illustrations ; 29 cm
Language
English
Description
Because they do not abide by the rules written by the adults around them, three children are judged unable to handle their freedom and forced to live in a box with three locks on the door.
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House
Pub. Date
2019.
Edition
First edition.
Physical Desc
viii, 129 pages ; 18 cm
Language
English
Description
"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,...