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Morrison will join the hangout from Google New York offices on Wednesday, February 27th starting at 3:00 p.m. EST. You can watch this event online via the Google+ page, Morrison’s Google+ page or the Google Play YouTube channel.
Here’s more about the event: “Using a Wacom tablet, Morrison will sign digital versions of her newest national bestseller, Home, published by the Knopf Doubleday Group, and will be signing the Vintage Books paperback edition of Home for Google employees. The live Hangout celebrates the paperback release of Home, as well as the culmination of Black History Month events sponsored by the Black Googler Network.” (Image Via)
Oprah Winfrey revealed her second Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis. Published by Knopf, the book “tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one indomitable heroine.”
Winfrey explained her choice: “The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away … I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.”
Winfrey will release an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 edition of the book. She will interview Mathis on Sunday, February 3 at 11 a.m. ET/PT on OWN’s “Super Soul Sunday,” but the episode will air on Oprah.com and OWN’s Facebook page and on Oprah Radio’s “Oprah’s Soul Series” on Sirius radio.
UK publisher Oberon Books has published Desdomona. This play, a re-imagining of William Shakespeare’s Othello, features writing by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, lyrics by Malian musician Rokia Traoré and a foreword by theater director Peter Sellers.
Here’s more from the release: “Desdemona is an extraordinary narrative of words, music and song about Shakespeare’s doomed heroine, who speaks from the grave about the traumas of race, class, gender, war — and the transformative power of love. Toni Morrison transports one of the most iconic, central and disturbing treatments of race in Western culture into the new realities and potential outcomes facing a rising generation of the 21st century.”
The story focuses on the relationship shared between Othello’s wife and her African nurse Barbary. Morrison became inspired to write the play as a response to Sellars’ 2009 production of Othello. Desdemona first debuted in May 2011 at Vienna’s Theatre Azkent. Productions have ran in Belgium, the United States and Germany. In July 2012, Sellers directed the play at London’s Barbican Concert Hall.
Bob Dylan and Toni Morrison will be among the 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States, alongside other notables as Madeleine Albright, John Glenn and John Paul Stevens.
Bob Dylan and Toni Morrison will be among the 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States, alongside other notables as Madeleine Albright, John Glenn and John Paul Stevens.
As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now explore the library online and watch it grow.
Currently, the makeshift library counts 390 books. Follow this link to find out how you can donate. We’ve listed ten books from the library below, illustrating the scope of the collection. The Occupy Wall Street librarians also hope to schedule more author visits.
Here’s more from the library blog: Rather than having scheduled mega-events with activist authors coming to pep talk the whole occupation, I would prefer smaller, impromptu groups and a books-oriented approach to fit with our little niche mission. My idea is to ask authors to come talk about the “books that have inspired you” and then whatever else they want. We can post announcements in advance on a dry erase board and/or make an announcement when someone arrives. Then, whoever happens to be around can come check it out. If it’s only a few people, I see no problem with that. Whatever stimulates conversations, and huge groups don’t allow it so much. I feel this is a good role for our library.
The cast of ‘Jersey Shore’ (is banding together to demand more money for their fourth season, set to start filming in just a few weeks in Italy. Among the contested points in their contracts: limited personal appearances. Snooki has been... Read the rest of this post
“Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” I asked my friend Alex Chee in email this weekend, after reading a new story of his that powerfully evokes the kind of moony, depressive, sickeningly self-reflective state I’ve been in. “Because the end of this novel is completely kicking my ass. I hate what I’m learning about myself as I write it, but the dissociated part of me is fascinated that I’m learning so much about myself by writing something that is not literally about me at all.”
He replied:
I think we do. In true first person, definitely. God knows it was why writing Edinburgh was hell. When someone asked me if I wanted to work on a screenplay for it I thought ‘Not for anything in the world.’ But also, for writers, there’s a book that makes you as you make it. And in the writing of it, you learn to master both yourself and the book in a way you never have to again.
What comes to mind is advice Annie Dillard gave us, to think of yourself as going down in an old-fashioned diving bell [see above], a thread of air connecting you back to yourself. And when you must, to return to the surface. To treat an engagement with that work like deep sea diving. She meant for essays, memoir, but I found it applies to first person autobiographical fiction, too.
Oprah Winfrey picked a classic double header for her latest book club selection, choosing Charles Dickens‘ Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.
During her announcement, Winfrey noted: “I’m going old, old school … Normally I only choose books that I have read, but I must shamefully admit to you all that I have never read Dickens.”
Winfrey will use Penguin’s new $20 paperback containing both books and nearly 800 pages. Amazon noted yesterday they have free Kindle editions of both titles. Penguin offers a $7.99 digital edition that includes illustrations, author background, and historical information.
Toni Morrison's books have been challenged on a consistent basis. Hear what she has to say about censorship. According to an Associated Press article by Hillel Italie,
Morrison, 78, has long experience with censorship. Her novels "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and "The Bluest Eye" have frequently been threatened with removal from library shelves — and sometimes pulled — because of sexual, racial or violent content.
Burn This Book is a collection of essays on censorship, edited by Toni Morrison and published in May 2009. Read a review at "Travels of a Bookworm" and check out the links, including one to an excerpt of Burn This Book.
Join us in reading banned and challenged books. The Banned Book Challenge continues until June 30. Set your own goal.
2 Comments on Toni Morrison Burn This Book, last added: 6/20/2009
Hi, this is Hannah from the National Coalition Against Censorship. We hosted this event with Toni Morrison, so it's great to read here about how important it is to read banned books!
We hope you can help us publicize a disturbing call for book challenges in public libraries. In yesterday’s morning news segment “Unfit to Print?” [http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/22577720/unfit-to-print.htm#q="gossip+girls"], Fox News interviewed two parents calling for removal of Gossip Girl and other young adult fiction from the youth section of the Leesburg, Florida public library. While the public library has voted to keep the contested books on the shelves, parents argue that the books should be pulled from the 12+ young adult section. In the video, parent Dianne Venetta states, “This is not about censorship” but calls upon “parents to go and see what’s in the youth section of your public library.”
We've written a letter supporting the Leesburg library in its effort to retain the books where they are in the youth section, noting that the Constitution “prohibits the public library from censoring material because some people find it offensive or distasteful. The public library’s role is to serve the entire community, not to reflect or cater to any specific viewpoint.” [http://ncac.org/Kids-Right-to-Read-Project-Opposes-Book-Challenges-in-Leesburg-FL-Public-Library]
We hope you can use this Freedom to Read blog (great idea, by the way!) to make a statement upholding young adults’ right to read (even young adult fiction!).
I walked toward and finally into Toni Morrison's A Mercy. My feet a little uncertain on the slippery path, one voice of the many not ringing entirely right to my ear—at first. It's 1680 and a hazy, betraying time. It's a trader named Jacob, his wife Rebekka, their servant Lina, a promiscuous child named Sorrow, a traded-to-cancel-a-debt girl named Florens, and a blacksmith, an African, who walks about Jacob's homestread free. It's a time of religious radicalism and flesh trade and small pox—a time when to own more is to seemingly store up legacy, and when to love hard is to fall.
A choral story—not limpid but liquid, where brutality bathes in prose that is sometimes so gorgeous that one cannot reckon the act with the words used to describe it. It's necessary to read Morrison, or at least the best of her. It is important to go back to slave trade, to the jungle overhang and to the panting bears of a not-yet-settled country.
From the end—like a prayer, like the rising final words of a sermon, like a truth that will not be suffused:
... to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
2 Comments on A Mercy (Toni Morrison), last added: 1/4/2009
I find myself a bit afraid of Morrison, after having a hard time coming to grips with her work in college. Of course, now that I'm older (much!) and wiser (hopefully!)perhaps I should allow myself to try again :)
It's about closing the mind at first, and feeling the story through its rhythms. Clarity soon sets in. What bothered me was the voice narrating Jacob, which seemed, at times, didactic, more explanatory, a jarring inconsistency with the rest of the incantations.
Two more books are being challenged by parents of Howell Public High School students. In this entry and this entry, there is information about The Freedom Writers Diary which faced a challenge from parents and a community group called "LOVE" (Livingston Organization for Values in Education) because of profanity. Today the Daily Press and Argus reports that Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison which are both taught in Grade 11 may be removed from the curriculum because of graphic sexual content and profanity. A decision as to whether they would left in the classroom was delayed because the school board did not have the necessary number of votes to either approve or table the curriculum. The two books have been on the curriculum for years but a change from semesters to year-long classes opened the opportunity for debate on the books being used.
The newspaper reports that the majority of the speakers were in favor of allowing the continued use of the books and that they were loudly applauded by the crowd of about 150 people. The curriculum was approved by a group of teachers from the particular school, a district-wide subject-specific content committee, a district-wide curriculum and assessment committee, among others, before being presented to the school board.
The curriculum was approved by the school board with voting on the books themselves to be voted on at the February meeting.
The The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature describes Black Boy as follows:
Autobiography by Richard Wright, published in 1945 and considered to be one of his finest works. The book is sometimes considered a fictionalized autobiography or an autobiographical novel because of its use of novelistic techniques. Black Boy describes vividly Wright's often harsh, hardscrabble boyhood and youth in rural Mississippi and in Memphis, Tenn. When the work was first published, many white critics viewed Black Boy primarily as an attack on racist Southern white society. From the 1960s the work came to be understood as the story of Wright's coming of age and development as a writer whose race, though a primary component of his life, was but one of many that formed him as an artist.
Random House describes the book as follows:
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
The Daily Press & Argus reports that the Howell Board of Education voted 5-2 to allow teachers to assign The Freedom Writers Diary, Black Boy, and The Bluest Eye to advanced English classes. School Board member Wendy Day who voted for the ban states she has filed a form to ask for an official review of the Morrison book.
Update: The Conservative Media Blog reports that banners are still "howelling" in Howell, MI. The Daily Press and Argus reports that some parents are taking the battle to the courts, claiming that books on the curriculum break pornography laws. Stay tuned. It isn't over yet.
Librarian Kathryn Greenhill, the Australian blogger of Librarians Matter mulls over the pros and cons of having a book in a university library that tells one how to kill oneself.
0 Comments on Offensive and Dangerous Words as of 3/14/2007 12:50:00 AM
Imagine a book club full of Dick-heads all studying the same book.
That's right. A longtime fan of science fiction genius Philip K. Dick will be live-blogging his reading experience this summer. David Gill (founder of both the blog and the pun, Total Dick Head) will be revisiting Dick's dense novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
His post inspired me to dig out my own copy and re-read this trippy masterpiece. Check it out:
"Scene by scene, chapter by chapter, I'll be analyzing the action, looking for common PKD themes and connections to other works, enjoying the new notes on the novel prepared by Jonathan Lethem for the Library of America release, and exploring scholarly work done on the novel."
Yesterday Kimberlee Morrison suggested we all pick up the "cerebral and intricate" novel Paradise. That book has already spawned plenty of book club analysis, but could merit a blogged reading as well.
Close reading such "intricate" books will make you a stronger writer and help you find your reading community as well. What other books could use this kind of close reading among blogging fans?
Novelist Toni Morrison will headline a Google+ Hangout and a digital book signing.
Oprah Winfrey revealed her second Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis. Published by Knopf, the book “tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one indomitable heroine.”
UK publisher Oberon Books has published Desdomona. 
As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now 
I've seen this quote before, and I love it. It is so true. I write, so I'm working on it!