Little Cloud and Lady Wind

Little Cloud drifts in the sky with the other clouds and has a life that any cloud would want. But Little Cloud isn't happy. She doesn't want to make thunder and rain like the other clouds. The earth below is so beautiful -- purple mountains, scarves of snow, silver-topped waves. She wants to live and play on the earth and be on her own.

How will Little Cloud ever come to understand that everything has its special place in the world, most especially her?

Inspired by the favorite Aesop story "The Bundle of Sticks," Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison tell a gentle and loving tale that illustrates that the whole is far mightier than any single part. Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor recipient Sean Qualls's shimmering paintings sparkle from the pages of this timeless fable.
Title: Little Cloud and Lady Wind
Author: Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison
Published: 2010-01-26

Black Expressions Book Club

Peeny Butter Fudge

Snuggle, snuggle.
Time to rest.
Nana joins us in her nest.

There is no one like Nana in the whole wide world. She is the best. Nana knows how to take an ordinary afternoon and make it extra special! Nap time, story time, and playtime are transformed by fairies, dragons, dancing, and pretending -- and then mixing and fixing yummy, yummy fudge just like Nana and Mommy did not so many years ago....

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and her son Slade tell a story of what really goes on when Nana is left in charge!
Title: Peeny Butter Fudge
Author: Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison
Published: 2009-09-15

Black Expressions Book Club

A Mercy

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.
Title: A Mercy (Vintage International)
Author: Toni Morrison
Published: 2009-08-11

Black Expressions Book Club

Burn This Book

Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.

Title: Burn This Book
Author: Toni Morrison
Published: 2009-05-05

Black Expressions Book Club

What Moves at the Margin

What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.

The first section of the book, "Family and History," includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, "Writers and Writing," offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, "Politics and Society," includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture.

Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

Title: What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
Author: Toni Morrison
Published: 2008-04-01

Black Expressions Book Club