The commanding voice of Morrison's essays, speeches and reviews offers compelling insights into family, history, other writers and politics. The pieces span from 1971, when Morrison was an editor at Random House, to 2002, the year she won the Nobel Prize, and range from book introductions to thoughts on the nature of writing and reflections on 9/11.--From publisher description.

Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker's critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple. Alice Walker made history in 1983 when she became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through...

Essays, poetry, and art included in this anthology celebrate the one-hundredth birthday of the late poet and cultural icon Gwendolyn Brooks.

"Octavia E. Butler's work broke innumerable barriers and helped open the field of science fiction to writers and readers it had never had before. As the first Black writer to win the coveted Nebula and Hugo Awards, her courage and vision left a peerless legacy for fans not just of science fiction, but of American literature. In this collection of 10 interviews, 3 of them never published, Butler speaks with candor and openness about her work, her imaginative...

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...