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, 1993Spanning 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... Views: 531
Thaddeus Minnow accidentally gets transported to a strange world, and he's not the first. This sort of thing happens, but nobody knows how to send him back. Thaddeus will attempt to be the first person to find his way back home.AMY PLEBThis book features three stories all based around the life of a girl called Amy Pleb.The Big StormAmy Pleb is to anyone who knows her a normal 9 year old girl who lives in Cogan on the Fogan with her parents Calamity and Arthur. But Amy has an unnatural fear of storms. She has harboured this fear for as long as she can remember. She recalls it all starting when her father Arthur told her the story of the big storm he endured when he was a small boy. This had generated an interest in Amy which had turned into an obsession and then complete fear.A few days before Amy’s birthday, although she doesn’t know it her worst fears are about to come true. The weatherman forecasts the worst storm ever is heading their way. Amy becomes distraught and retreats to her bedroom with her beloved cat Tilly in tow. But the skies don’t darken and the rain doesn’t start as predicted so Amy begins to relax believing the weatherman must have got it wrong.But then out of nowhere a massive clap of thunder echoes around the village, the skies light up with lightning and the rain pours down. Amy thinks this is the end for her and her family.The Tall TowerAmy Pleb is going to stay with her Uncle Lawless in Fogan for a week. Near where her Uncle lives on the outskirts of Fogan is the Tall Tower, on a large hill surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs, the only access is up a series of some one hundred steps. Amy asks her Uncle if he will take her up there but he tells her no and that she is forbidden to go up there because it’s haunted.Amy meets up with her friend Katie Bench who lives next door to her Uncle. Amy and Katie talk about many things but then start to talk about the Tall Tower. They decide to go for a walk and end up at the foot of the Tower. They notice a fence and a no trespassers sign and Amy is ready to turn round and go back but Katie jumps the fence and begins to climb the steps. Amy follows as she is worried for her friend. Once inside the Tower they see a huge door which is open. Katie being quite headstrong continues up into the Tower with a reluctant Amy behind her. Once inside they hear noises and become quite frightened and then a ghostly figure appears.Amy is unable to tell her Uncle what has happened in the Tower as she knows she has betrayed his wishes. But before long events take a turn and she has to admit to him what she has done to save her friend. The Week of DisastersAs every child knows sometimes in life things don’t go according to plan, it’s just one disaster after another. But for Amy she really does have a bad week. It starts with a bad day at school, an awful grade, a telling off from the head teacher and a smelly class mate. She has a bad hair day, a spot that she cannot get rid of and has a fall out with her best friend over a boy. She tries to read a book but has interruption after interruption. Her parents threaten to ground her for good if she does not tidy her room. She meets up with a flatulent ferret, loses her new kitten and to top it all her dad falls off a ladder. Views: 496
Three very short science fiction stories. Each is only around eight hundred words.This story is fiction, however it is based on a collection of events that actual happened to me or some of my musician friends during my 50 years in the music industry.The story takes you back to the late 50's and through to the early swinging sixties, when the musical world suddenly awoke to the sounds of a new musical revolution that was emerging from all parts of England. Johnny Morris and the Convertibles were part of that revolution that took them on one hell of a wild ride, as they slowly made their way to the top of their profession. While enjoying the brighter side of life along the way, they often fell victim to the darker side, that lay in wait, and in the end, it became their undoing.This is a personal account of how Johnny Morris remembers his rise and fall. Views: 496
All Hardin has ever known is the inside of a bomb shelter. His people hid there over one hundred years ago when a war tore apart the world outside. They send hunters out to look for food, but they are hunted by the enemy to this day. As conditions grow worse inside it is up to Hardin to make a plan to journey outside and confront the enemy once and for all.All Hardin has ever known is the inside of a bomb shelter. His people hid there during a nuclear war, and were too scared to ever leave. When the food began to run out they saw no other way and so opened the doors to the outside to find it destroyed. Hunters have searched in vain for years and chance getting killed by the enemy over one hundred years after the world was destroyed. Hardin finds that his people's ways are only leading to the end of them all. Hardin gets a team together and leaves the shelter hoping to make peace with the enemy and save his home. What he discovers is greater and stranger than he ever thought possible. Views: 468
Royden Doble and his family recently moved into a strange building called the Discovery Apartments. He soon realizes that this building is filled strange tenants including aliens and monsters. In fact his family are the only humans there. Royden learns a lot, but as things get treacherous he has to decide if he wants to stay or leave. Unfortunately for Royden, the decision isn't his to make.So, I Ate my neighbor's elephant. It didn't taste very nice. So, I say sorry to him in the best way I can; by using poetry. Views: 407
At once the ideal introduction to Toni Morrison and a lovely and moving keepsake for her devoted readers: a treasury of quotations from her work. With a foreword by Zadie Smith."She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truthteller." —Oprah WinfreyThrough bricolage—a construction or creation from a diverse range of available things—this brief book aims to evoke the totality of Toni Morrison's literary vision and achievement. It dramatizes the life of her powerful mind by juxtaposing quotations, one to a page, drawn from her entire body of work, both fiction and nonfiction—from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, from Playing in the Dark to The Source of Self-Regard.Its compelling sequence of flashes of revelation—stunning for their linguistic originality, keenness of psychological observation, and philosophical profundity—addresses issues of abiding interest in Morrison's work: the reach of language... Views: 325
Young Ackerley has only ever known the small town life on the edge of society. That is until his brother takes him to a large castle to live out the remainder of the war brought by horrible invaders from the north. It is here that Ackerley makes his first friends, learns the history of the kingdom, and helps a lonely princess. All while the threat of attack looms ever larger.It’s late summer in 1901 and Joseph Albers is a man in trouble: he bet everything on a Kentucky coal mine, but soon after his mine collapsed the family and friends who followed him from Atlanta began falling to smallpox and yellow fever. In a desperate attempt to save what’s left of his town – and his dream of making it big in coal country – Joseph hunkers down at the crossroads, hoping for a midnight meeting with the devil.Instead Joseph encounters the ancient, ageless god Charley Cat, and finds himself surrounded by the demons, legends, and creatures of myth who travel with him. By the time their parley has ended, the fate of Piquette will have changed forever. Views: 269
National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 269
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, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 190
The most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection—a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, goodness in the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of... Views: 175
Amazon.com ReviewIn the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved. A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law. Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix WilberFrom Publishers WeeklyMixed with the lyric beauty of the writing, the fury in Morrison's (Song of Solomonp latest book is almost palpable. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this haunting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath traces the life of a young woman, Sethe, who has kept a terrible memory at bay only by shutting down part of her mind. Juxtaposed with searing descriptions of brutality, gradually revealed in flashbacks, are equally harrowing scenes in which fantasy takes flesh, a device Morrison handles with consummate skill. The narrative concerns Sethe's former life as a slave on Sweet Home Farm, her escape with her children to what seems a safe haven and the tragic events that ensue. The death of Sethe's infant daughter Beloved is the incident on which the plot hinges, and it is obvious to the reader that the sensuous young woman who mysteriously appears one day is Beloved's spirit, come back to claim Sethe's love. Sethe's surviving daughter, Denver, immediately grasps the significance of Beloved's return and so does Paul Dno period after D, another escapee from Sweet Home; but Sethe herself resists comprehension, and, as a result, a certain loss of tension affects the latter part of the narrative. But this is a small flaw in a novel full of insights, both piercing and tender, with distinctive, memorable characters, flowing prose that conveys speech patterns with musical intensity and a brilliantly conceived story. As a record of white brutality mitigated by rare acts of decency and compassion, and as a testament to the courageous lives of a tormented people, this novel is a milestone in the chronicling of the black experience in America. It is Morrison writing at the height of her considerable powers, and it should not be missed. BOMC main selection. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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