Toni Morrison
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The Last Book I Loved: Home
I’ve been drawn to Morrison lately because I’ve been thinking about historical and social wakes as I’ve felt the swaying of the ones I’m in.
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The End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature syllabi. Columbia refused to include warnings, but essentially capitulated by…
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Letter to Everyone Else
Ta-Nehisi Coates continues to storm the literary world over at Rolling Stone and New York Magazine, and if those accolades weren’t enough, Toni Morrison has decreed him to “fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
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God Help the Mother
Her name becomes shorthand for a republic of women and black artists with “no home in this place” to borrow a phrase from Morrison’s Nobel lecture, people who create, reclaim and celebrate art that is intent on offering something of…
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Riding With the Queen
Over at the New York Times, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles Toni Morrison in a tremendous essay: Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in order to do the work. The work “protects,” she told…
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Toni Morrison, Resplendent Orchid
Toni Morrison was honored at this year’s National Book Critics Circle award ceremony, and Rita Dove’s remarks capture Morrison’s ongoing legacy beautifully. Dove describes her own joy in discovering The Bluest Eye, the first book in the University of Iowa’s…
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Diverse Books by the Numbers
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Amy Rothschild explores the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, and the many strategies advocates are using to make a lasting change in the landscape of children’s literature. While 2014 showed a hopeful bump in books penned by and depicting people…
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Stop Worrying About What Comes Next
At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark analyzes several last sentences from well-known novels by Hemingway, Tolstoy, Morrison, and Roth. He pays particular attention to the craftsmanship necessary to write these sentences, and considers how last sentences work to reinforce larger themes within…
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Chipotle: The Next New Yorker?
Last year Jonathan Safran Foer teamed up with Chipotle to create a line of cups and to-go bags with short stories by Toni Morrison and George Saunders printed on the side. Now the author is at it again, curating a…
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The Rumpus Interview with Nayomi Munaweera
Nayomi Munaweera discusses Sri Lanka, its brutal Civil War, and writing a novel about two artists with their identities wrapped up in two different countries, Sri Lanka and America.