Toni Morrison

A stunning, timeless story about race, friendship, what keeps us apart and what drives us apart, from the one and only Toni Morrison, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta met in a girls' shelter as children. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then on opposing sides of a protest. The two women are seemingly at opposite ends of every issue, but the persistence of their bond is undeniable. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

A beautiful hardback edition of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel, from the great Toni Morrison. Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, 'Beloved'. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work.

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread - is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever. Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

'What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?' Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. 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. VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Soon after a local eccentric leaps from a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Macon 'Milkman' Dead III is born. Brought up by his well-off black family to revere the white world around him, Milkman strives to make sense of his conflicting identities. Always seeking flight in some way, he leaves his Michigan home for the South, retracing the steps of his forebears in search of his own buried heritage and is introduced to an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins; the inhabitants of a fully realised black world. Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Song of Solomon is a brilliantly imagined coming-of-age tale.

Pecola Breedlove longs for blond hair and blue eyes, so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the marigolds in her garden will not bloom, and her wish will not come true. Pecola's life is about to change in other painful and devastating ways. A powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty, The Bluest Eye asks vital questions about race, class and gender and remains one of Toni Morrison's most unforgettable works.

A vital new non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time `Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.' The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout A Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence. The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison's Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America's Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers. A Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. `To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And, if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?' The Alexander Lecture series, 2002

Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An ex-slave is haunted by a lonely, rebukeful ghost, bent on bringing their past home. Strange and unexpected, yet always stirring, Morrison's writing on race sinks us deep into the heart and mind of our troubled humanity. Includes selections from the books Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved by Toni Morrison. VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Sisters by Louisa May Alcott; Love by Jeanette Winterson; Babies by Anne Enright; and, Language by Xiaolu Guo.

Nejnovější román Toni Morrisonové v mnohém připomíná její nejlepší a nejvíc oceňovanou knihu Milovanou. Shodné je nejen téma otroctví, ale i způsob, jakým ho prozaička zpracovává. Příběhy jednotlivých postav, jež jsou stejně jako v Milované zejména ženské, vypráví s neobyčejnou intenzitou, která čtenáře hluboce zasáhne. Děj románu zasadila spisovatelka do doby, kdy Američané práci otroků teprve začínali využívat. Skutečné břímě dějin i pohnuté osobní historie na svých bedrech nese úvodní a klí čová vypravěčka Milosrdenství: celý příběh zahajuje Florensina zpověď, jež rekapituluje svízelnou cestu černé otrokyně k vnitřní svobodě. Její doslova otrockou lásku k africkému kováři zapříčinilo někdejší upření lásky mateřské, a Florens se tudíž zb aví šance na budoucí štěstí zrovna ve chvíli, kdy se jí naskytla možnost jej dosáhnout. A krutou ironií osudu se s matkou v jistém slova smyslu opětovně setká pouze na závěrečných stránkách knihy Devátý román Toni Morrisonové je více než důstojným p okračováním toho, co John Updike nazval vznešeným a nutným literárním projektem, jehož cílem je odhalení hrůz otroctví a potíží, s nimiž se potýkají Afroameričané. Autorka se tu sice zabývá tzv. velkými tématy jako rasové předsudky, ponížení a nesv oboda, ale v konečném efektu je Milosrdenství daleko poetičtější a mnohoznačnější, než by se na první pohled zdálo.

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, 'Beloved'. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work.

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. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing. '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

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.