About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

Reviews

Morrison's authoritative novel--a BOMC main selection and a 17-week PW bestseller in cloth--tells the story of three intersecting tragic lives, and adroitly uses the motif of jazz to make palpable the feel and excitement of Harlem in the 1920s. (Apr.)

"Wonderful. . . . A brilliant, daring novel. . . . Every voice amazes." -Chicago Tribune

"She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner." -Newsweek

"[A] masterpiece. . . . She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison." -Entertainment Weekly

"Thrillingly written . . . seductive. . . . Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel." -Chicago Sun-Times

"A compelling blend of heart and language. . . . Resounds with passion." -The Boston Globe

"Marvelous. . . . Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time." -Vogue

"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women." -Edna O'Brien, The New York Times Book Review

"She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation-that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite." -San Francisco Chronicle

"As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. . . . Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." -Glamour

"She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart." -John Leonard, National Public Radio

"A masterpiece. . . . A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion. . . . Mesmerizing." -Cosmopolitan

"Lyrically brooding. . . . One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator's mind." -The New York Times

"Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious." -People