Four young women living in a convent near Ruby, Oklahoma, are viciously attacked in 1976 after residents become convinced the women are the source of the problems that have been sweeping the exclusively African-American community.

Four generations of black life in America. 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, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins,...

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...

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...

"The deep bluesy sadness of this novel wails out of the pages?as expressively as a saxophone," writes Digby Diehl of Toni Morrison's 1993 novel. Set in 1926, at the height of the Harlem renaissance, it follows the lives of the Joe and Violet Vace, who have moved from the South to escape the hardships of segregation. They find a city throbbing with the music that represents both artistic freedom and moral decline. Jazz is story of passion, jealousy,...

Una potente novela sobre un crimen pasional y sus consecuencias ambientada en el Harlem de la decada de 1920, con la firma inconfundible de Toni Morrison. Cuando Violet y Joe Trace, un matrimonio entrado en an~os, llegan a Nueva York huyendo de la intolerancia de su Virginia natal, creen que podran vivir en libertad sin importar el color de su piel. Pero el Harlem de los an~os '20, foco de un vibrante renacimiento cultural, les depara apuros inesperados....

A collection of quotations drawn from Toni Morrison's entire body of work. Includes a listing of attributed works.