The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

Written by Paule Marshall

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 1984
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-72633-5 (0-394-72633-2)

The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants -- black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement.  When the advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve -- between natives and foreigners, black and... Read more >

Tears of the Giraffe
A No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Novel (2)
Written by Alexander McCall Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 3, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3135-1 (1-4000-3135-4)

The continuing story of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency finds our wily heroine searching for a young man who disappeared into the African plains many years ago. Along the way she becomes engaged to Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, a good man who passes the most difficult test (her father... Read more >

Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands

Written by Susan Carol McCarthy

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: April 1, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-38103-0 (0-553-38103-2)

Awards & Honors:
*2003 Chautauqua South Fiction Award
*2003 San Diego Magazine's Book Award for Fiction
*2002 Deadly Pleasures' Best U.S. First Novel

Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands Common Reads List
ONE BOOK, ONE COMMUNITY READS:
•Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 2009 Freshman Year Read
•Finlandia University, Hancock, MI 2009 Freshman Year Read
•Montcalm... Read more >

Elbow Room

Written by James Alan McPherson

Format: Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Fawcett
On Sale: October 12, 1986
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-449-21357-5 (0-449-21357-9)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

These twelve stories explore the line between black and white America.  

"McPherson...can tell a story, describe shadings of character, and make sociological observations with equal subtlety...The characters speak eloquently for themselves." - The New Yorker Read more >

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Written by Anne Moody

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: February 3, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-33781-6 (0-385-33781-7)

A widely hailed and adopted social and historical commentary, this contemporary classic is the autobiography of a young black girl growing up in the Deep South. Moody details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had... Read more >

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Written by Anne Moody

Format: Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Dell
On Sale: January 4, 1992
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-440-31488-2 (0-440-31488-7)

A widely hailed and adopted social and historical commentary, this contemporary classic is the autobiography of a young black girl growing up in the Deep South. Moody details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had... Read more >

Beloved

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 360 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: October 17, 2006
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-26488-6 (0-307-26488-2)

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... Read more >

Beloved

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3341-6 (1-4000-3341-1)

Toni Morrison's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—first published in 1987—brought the unimaginable experience of slavery into the literature of our time and into our comprehension. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked her life in order to wrench herself from a living... Read more >

The Bluest Eye

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 8, 2007
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27844-9 (0-307-27844-1)

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her... Read more >

The Dancing Mind
Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished C ontribution to American Letters
Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 24 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: December 24, 1996
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-40032-2 (0-375-40032-X)

On the occasion of her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the sixth of November, 1996, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison speaks with brevity and passion to the pleasures, the difficulties, the necessities, of the readingwriting life in our time. Read more >

Home

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 1, 2013
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-74091-5 (0-307-74091-9)

When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger.

Frank is a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls... Read more >

Home

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 160 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: May 8, 2012
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-59416-7 (0-307-59416-5)

The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.

An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he... Read more >

Jazz

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7621-5 (1-4000-7621-8)

In the afterglow of a clean triumph—her widely celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, Beloved—Toni Morrison moves to even higher ground. This, her eagerly awaited new novel, Jazz, is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style.

It... Read more >

Love
A Novel
Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 4, 2005
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7847-9 (1-4000-7847-4)

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida—even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend... Read more >

Love

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: October 28, 2003
Price: $23.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-40944-8 (0-375-40944-0)

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida—even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the... Read more >

A Mercy

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 11, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27676-6 (0-307-27676-7)

National Bestseller

One 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... Read more >

A Mercy

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 11, 2008
Price: $23.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7 (0-307-26423-8)

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were... Read more >

The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Hardcover, 40 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: March 1, 1994
Price: $22.50
ISBN: 978-0-679-43437-5 (0-679-43437-2)

This is Toni Morrison's lecture and speech of acceptance upon the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 1993. Read more >

Song of Solomon

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3342-3 (1-4000-3342-X)

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a novel of large beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world we enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman), son of the richest black family in a mid-western... Read more >

Sula

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3343-0 (1-4000-3343-8)

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written—as John Leonard said in The New York Times—in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."

Sula has the same power, the... Read more >

Tar Baby

Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3344-7 (1-4000-3344-6)

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark... Read more >

The Hero And the Blues

Written by Albert Murray

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 16, 1996
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76220-1 (0-679-76220-5)

In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to... Read more >

The Magic Keys

Written by Albert Murray

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 8, 2006
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9553-7 (1-4000-9553-0)

The Magic Keys winningly evokes the coming to maturity of one of the great characters in contemporary American literature: Scooter, the central protagonist of Albert Murray’s highly acclaimed autobiographical novels Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots.

Growing up brilliant and curious in Alabama, Scooter was told he... Read more >

The Seven League Boots

Written by Albert Murray

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 4, 1997
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75858-7 (0-679-75858-5)

In the triumphant concluding volume of the trilogy that began with Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree, Albert Murray gives us what is at once an African American coming-of-age novel and a pitch-perfect evocation of a touring jazz band at the height of the Swing era. Murray's hero, Scooter, graduates from... Read more >

South to a Very Old Place

Written by Albert Murray

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 3, 1991
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73695-0 (0-679-73695-6)

The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and... Read more >