Toni Morrison

With her latest novel A Mercy , Toni Morrison offers up more evidence of why she is possibly America’s greatest living author. As in earlier works like Sula , Song of Solomon , and Beloved , in A Mercy Morrison examines the strange intersections of race and geography, family and culture, memory and storytelling. And like those great novels before it, at the center of A Mercy (a center, mind you that Morrison frequently works to decenter ) is that great post-modern question: what is identity? The late-seventeenth-century America of A Mercy is at once paradoxically both alien and familiar. This America is seemingly ... Read Full Story

There's an extremely interesting article written by Benjamin Pimentel that weaves through American and personal history in regard to this year's election: A group of young Americans, called the Freedom Riders, braved violence in the southern states in a bid to register black voters so they could finally take part in the electoral process. Meanwhile, in the fields of California, Filipino farm workers were gaining ground in the decades-old battle against abuse and injustice. Obama was three when three members of the Freedom Fighters – two white students Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and one black, James Chaney – were kidnapped and then beaten ... Read Full Story

From The Black List Project, a documetary film that gives insights on the struggles, triumphs, and joys of black life in this country and manages to re-define “blacklist” for a new century in the process, is. . . Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Toni Morrison, talking about an actual conversation she had with a friend at the age of 10 or 11 that inspired her to write, The Bluest Eyes The Bluest Eyes Toni Morrison Vintage, May 8, 2007 $13.00 US; ISBN: 0307278441 Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly ... Read Full Story

In this video clip, the grande damme of literature, Toni Morrison, explains the philosophy behind her latest book, 'A Mercy.' She discusses the distinction between the enslavement of blacks and general slavery that has existed since the dawn of man and why the enslavement of blacks, in particular, is so insidious and how it evolved in America. Watch and learn. Read Full Story

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gawker/2008/10/ohitititi.jpg" height="228" width="327" /Cranky old John Updike has always used his bully pulpit at iThe New Yorker/i to blast popular writers who didn't fit his idea of fiction. As he's gotten older, his hatred of anything he doesn't understand has become commensurately more transparent, earning the ire of Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, and David Foster Wallace. And when you use that power to throw iboth/i Toni Morrison and William Fau 19 Vote(s) Read Full Story