Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison draws on contemporary scholarship and Morrison's own commentary to explicate all of her novels published to date, including her 2008 novel A Mercy. Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner, is an unabashedly confrontational author. Her profound and complex novels address problems such as slavery, violence, poverty, and sexual abuse. Morrison's work encompasses a project of total cultural renewal: she re-imagines and reaffirms the experience of African Americans from the earliest days of slavery up to the present, avoiding stereotypes or oversimplification. She employs African and Western literary traditions and conventions as a basis for both structure and critique, re-writing some of the «master narratives» of American culture and history. This book analyzes Morrison's novels in the context of African American history and literature, and provides supplemental material to guide teachers and students to understand and appreciate Morrison's novels.

Teachers started assigning the novels of Toni Morrison long before she won the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature and before there was a significant body of secondary literature on the author. Now her works are the subject of countless studies and listed in the syllabi of an ever-increasing number of courses in schools and universities. The editors of this volume help the teacher to sort out the best materials and to meet the many challenges that Morrison's writings pose.

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.

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.

The Pulitzer Prize winner presents a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—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. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • This fiery and provocative novel from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner 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 forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” “Powerful.... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Portia and her cousin Julian discover adventure in a hidden colony of forgotten summer houses on the shores of a swampy lake.