Download or read book Jazz written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. “As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Margaret Reynolds and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Toni Morrison. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Toni Morrison, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Morrison's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Also included in this guide are detailed reading plans for the novels, questions for essays and discussion, contextual material, suggested texts for complementary and comparative reading, extracts from reviews, a biography, bibliography and a glossary of literary terms. Whether a teacher, student or general reader, Vintage Living Texts gives you the chance to explore new resources and enjoy new pleasures.
Download or read book Paradise written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Louisa Joyner and published by . This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential guide to the works of Toni Morrison is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with her, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Morrison¿s themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts is accompanied by likely exam questions -- as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Also included in this guide are detailed reading plans for all three novels, questions for essays and discussion, contextual material, suggested texts for complementary and comparative reading, a critical overview, a biography, a bibliography, and a glossary of literary terms.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison written by Justine Tally and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.
Download or read book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Melanie R. Anderson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-03-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Fiction written by Jan Furman and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.
Download or read book Living Beloved written by Erin Hawley and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During what can be a demanding and confusing season of life for many women, Living Beloved offers young mothers a chance to grow in their identity as children of God simply by observing their own little ones. By examining the simple characteristics of a child—transparency, trust, joy, boldness, and more—moms will learn to see their relationship with God their Father in a new way. Author Erin Hawley encourages Christian moms to view early motherhood as a wonderful tutoring session from God, as a lesson in how to grow closer to Him and live “beloved” as His child. The biblical insights and personal stories will renew readers, help them move closer to the Lord, and enjoy life as His child during the everyday routine of mamahood. This insightful and warm-hearted book will nourish a mom’s soul as she nourishes her children. Living Beloved helps young mothers develop a stronger sense of identity as children of God, leading to renewed strength, grace, and wisdom for the journey of motherhood.
Download or read book Home Matters written by R. Rubenstein and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-02-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, the longing associated with nostalgia may also function progressively as a vehicle for imaginatively 'fixing' the past in two senses: securing and mending or repairing. Considering fiction by two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, this study explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery. Rubenstein argues that nostalgia functions narratively as a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives re-frame a significant locus of concern in contemporary (female) experience: personal and/or cultural dis-placement and longing for home are ultimately transmuted - imaginatively, at least - by a restorative vision that enables healing and emotional repair.
Download or read book African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by K. Zauditu-Selassie and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author. No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison's work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie's many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison's work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing."--Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. K. Zauditu-Selassie delves deeply into African spiritual traditions, clearly explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a comprehensive, tour-de-force critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive. Zauditu-Selassie explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. Zauditu-Selassie is uniquely positioned to write this book, as she is not only a literary critic but also a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and nonfiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.
Download or read book Being Jazz written by Jazz Jennings and published by Ember. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate Pride every day with the teen advocate, trailblazer, and reality show star Jazz Jennings—one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Teens" of the year. In this groundbreaking memoir, she inspires people to accept the differences in others while they embrace their own truths through sharing her very public transgender journey. "Jazz is one of the transgender community's most important activists." —Cosmopolitan "A role model for teens everywhere." —Seventeen At the age of five, Jazz Jennings’s transition to life as a girl put her in the public spotlight after she shared her story on national television. She’s since become one of the most recognizable and prominent advocates for transgender teens, through her TV show, interviews, and social media. Jazz’s openness has led to bullying and mistreatment from those who don’t understand her choices. She’s fought for the right to use the girls’ bathroom and to play on a girls’ soccer team, paving the way for others. And in this book, Jazz faces an even greater struggle—dealing with the physical and social stresses of being a teen. But being on the front lines of trans activism doesn't stop Jazz from experiencing the joys of growing up, from day camp to first dates. Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest and most prominent voices in the national discussion about gender identity. This remarkable memoir is a testament to the power of accepting yourself, learning to live an authentic life, and helping everyone to embrace their own truths.
Download or read book Coq au Vin written by Charlotte Carter and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will hard-boiled New York street musician Nanette Hayes find love and music in the city of lights—or only heartbreak and murder? After a series of harrowing events, sassy self-taught saxophonist Nanette Hayes is back to her routine: street performing from the theater district to Riverside Park to Park Avenue, haunting the music stores on Bleecker, hanging out at the mobbed-up strip club where her BFF, Aubrey, is the reigning diva, and, to keep her mom in the dark, inventing more and more tales about her fictitious job at NYU as a French teacher. When Nanette’s overprotective mother tells her that her glamorous, bohemian auntie Vivian has gone missing in France under mysterious circumstances, Nanette is dispatched to Paris to help. Paris—her favorite city! Nan has to keep her focus on the mystery at hand and not on the coq au vin and Veuve Clicquot and jazz clubs. But the vibrant scene turns out to be the very thing that leads her deep into the underbelly of historic Paris, the crux of her aunt’s disappearance, a twenty-year-old murder—and a sexy duet with Andre, a gifted violinist and fellow street musician from Detroit who puts his life on the line to prove his love for her. Coq au Vin is the second book in the Nanette Hayes Mystery series.
Download or read book Toni Morrison Box Set written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A box set of Toni Morrison's principal works, featuring The Bluest Eye (her first novel), Beloved (Pulitzer Prize winner), and Song of Solomon (National Book Critics Award winner). Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, Beloved transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. This spellbinding novel tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who escapes to Ohio, but eighteen years later is still not free. In The New York Times bestselling novel, The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty and yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes, that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. With Song of Solomon, Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as she follows Milkman Dead from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, introducing an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. This beautifully designed slipcase will make the perfect holiday and perennial gift.
Download or read book I Am Jazz written by Jessica Herthel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a transgender child based on the real-life experience of Jazz Jennings, who has become a spokesperson for transkids everywhere "This is an essential tool for parents and teachers to share with children whether those kids identify as trans or not. I wish I had had a book like this when I was a kid struggling with gender identity questions. I found it deeply moving in its simplicity and honesty."—Laverne Cox (who plays Sophia in “Orange Is the New Black”) From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl's brain in a boy's body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn't feel like herself in boys' clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz's story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.
Download or read book Playing Changes written by Nate Chinen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes In jazz parlance, “playing changes” refers to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. In this definitive guide to the jazz of our time, leading critic Nate Chinen boldly expands on that idea, taking us through the key changes, concepts, events, and people that have shaped jazz since the turn of the century—from Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill to Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding; from the phrase “America’s classical music” to an explosion of new ideas and approaches; from claims of jazz’s demise to the living, breathing scene that exerts influence on mass culture, hip-hop, and R&B. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, packed with essential album lists and listening recommendations, Playing Changes takes the measure of this exhilarating moment—and the shimmering possibilities to come.
Download or read book Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
