Toni Morrison
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who 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.
3) Sula
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Sula Peace and Nel Wright share not only an intimate friendship, but an unspoken secret. Sula leaves Medallion, Ohio for ten years and when she dies three years after her return, Nel is her only mourner. Young Adult
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 216
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he,...
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he,...
5) A mercy
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
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.
6) Home
Author
Language
English
Description
"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
Author
Language
English
Description
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves 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...
8) Love
Author
Pub. Date
2003
Language
English
Description
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a spellbinding symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of Black women in a fading beach town.
“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything...
“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything...
9) Paradise
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
A group of black women in Oklahoma flee abuse at the hands of their men, moving into a former convent where they form a support group, an initiative which arouses the ire of the town's men. A look at a black community, with its tensions of tradition versus modernity, patriarchy versus matriarchy and fidelity versus promiscuity.
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
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
Pub. Date
2020, ©2019
Language
English
Description
One of the most celebrated and revered writers in the history of American literature gives us a new nonfiction collection - a gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. This book is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11, the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Ir., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James...
15) Tar baby
Author
Pub. Date
1993, c1981
Language
English
Description
Probes the relationships between whites and blacks, blacks and blacks, women and men.
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Offers a humorous and insightful look at how children experience meanness and anger in our world...To a child, meanness can have many shapes, sizes, and sounds. The wise young narrator shows that meanness can be a whisper or a shout, a smile or a frown as the list of mean people grows to include parents, siblings, and bullies of several varieties"--
Author
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Description
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...
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...
18) Bluest Eye, The
Author
Pub. Date
[1970]
Language
English
Description
Eleven-year-old Pecola prayed that she would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting, her father would stop drinking, and her brother would stop running away. Young Adult
19) Please, Louise
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Language
English
Description
On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Ralph Ellison: an American journey is the first documentary on one of the most gifted and intellectually provocative authors of modern American literature. It establishes Ellison as a central figure in contemporary debates over art, politics, race and nationhood. Narrated by Andre Braugher, the film brilliantly presents the first scenes ever filmed from Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible man. The extended Film version is nothing less than a virtual...