Gothic literature (1)

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Paradise

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

We don't know quite how Toni Morrison does what she does, but we do know we are left shaken as readers and, to a profound degree, changed

Morrison has brought it all together: the poetry, the emotion, the broad symbolic plan

Deeply serious and unexpectedly beautiful

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America&rsquo;s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Four young women are brutally attacked near an all-black town in rural Oklahoma. 
 
The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise. Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of its American citizens with astonishing clarity. It is through their eyes we see the clashes that have defined a nation. 
 
'When Morrison writes at her best, you can feel the workings of history through her prose' Hilary Mantel, Spectator 
 
'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the 20th century, to a place where it could finally embrace the subtleties and contradictions of the great stain of race which has blighted the republic since its inception' Caryl Phillips, Guardian 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Tar Baby

Deeply perceptive...Returns risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel

Toni Morrison's writing is a train that knows where it's going, fierce and fast-moving in narrative, lyrically showy in description

Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability

It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships

Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language...One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison' s story

Mercurial imagination and brilliantly elegant prose-She has the ability to shock and entrance, episode by episode, which is the hallmark of a genuine writer

That rare commodity, a truly public novel... Morrison' s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates

Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking

Powerful... A stunning performance... Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine. Then there&rsquo;s Son. 
 
Jadine is sophisticated, beautiful, a black American graduate of the Sorbonne. Son is a black fugitive from small-town Florida who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between black and white people, masters and servants, and men and women. 
 
An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction** 
 
'Toni Morrison was a quintessential, unabashedly American writer. Like her fellow giant, Walt Whitman, her work was, above all, audacious. She seized the landscape with a flourish and wove it, unwove it and put it back together' Bonnie Greer, Guardian

Jazz

A tale of love, death, beauty, murder and obsession...told in a free-form syncopated prose so rhythmic that you can almost imagine Nina Simone singing it

Joe Trace &ndash; in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband &ndash; shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
'Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers' Guardian 
 
'She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

The Bluest Eye

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. 
 
Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of becoming beautiful, of becoming someone &ndash; like her white schoolfellows &ndash; worthy of care and attention. Immersing us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression Ohio, Toni Morrison&rsquo;s indelible debut reveals the nightmare at the heart of Pecola&rsquo;s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfilment. 
 
**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH&rsquo;S BOOK CLUB** 
 
'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch 
 
'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post 
 
'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben Okri 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Sula

'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times 
 
As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. 
 
Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down. 
 
'What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age' Alice Walker, Guardian 
 
**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH&rsquo;S BOOK CLUB** 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL

Beloved

A special edition of the award-winning classic

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave. 
 
Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, &lsquo;Beloved&rsquo;. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison&rsquo;s enduring masterpiece and best-known work. 
 
&lsquo;Dazzling. . . Magical. . . An extraordinary work&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours&hellip; Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all&rsquo; Margaret Atwood 
 
&lsquo;An American masterpiece&rsquo; A. S. Byatt 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 
 
**One of the BBC&rsquo;s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don&rsquo;t seem to come close to explaining her

Song of Solomon&hellip;profoundly changed my life

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

Lured South by tales of buried treasure, Milkman embarks on an odyssey back home. 
 
As a boy, Milkman was raised beneath the shadow of a status-obsessed father. As a man, he trails in the fiery wake of a friend bent on racial revenge. Now comes Milkman&rsquo;s chance to uncover his own path. Along the way, he will lose more than he could have ever imagined. Yet in return, he will discover something far more valuable than gold: his past, his true self, his life-long dream of flight. 
 
&lsquo;A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;Song of Solomon&hellip;profoundly changed my life&rsquo; Marlon James 
 
INTRODUCED BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR MARLON JAMES 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Praise for Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

Books by Toni Morrison

Series by Toni Morrison

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics169 Books

Vintage American Gothic9 Books

Vintage Classics Morrison2 Books

Vintage Deco9 Books

Articles featuring Toni Morrison

A guide to Gothic literature

A guide to magical realism

The ultimate Black History Month reading list

The best literary quotes about summer