What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction

Description

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. Review: Brilliance - Spending time with Toni Morrison, hearing her voice, I got caught up with her, in her brilliance. It is a marvel to me just how brilliant she is, this glimpse into how her mind works, into what it is to be intellectually brilliant and soulful too, and a voice so assured that she gets right down to it from the first moment and never lets up. After reading only a little I knew why I had to buy the Morrison book, (which was expensive for me)…to hear her many words, spoken over a long life, that give ultimate value to the Word and its redemptive qualities. She has such a unique voice that she calls up something different in me than anyone else has, and it is a bit like waking, like revelation, like not being fully awake but coming awake, and yet lost in that area of not being quite lucid yet. I often jot quotes from books in a journal but I couldn’t pull out the things she wrote that moved me most because they wouldn’t have it. They have to remain whole to be what they are. She has no sound bytes but what happens with the few sentences you can pull out, is you get a reminder from them but not the whole wallop over the head that says something you can’t repeat and not only because you can’t remember and do not even know, but only for it having spoken to you way down deep. Returning to “What Moves at the Margin” later, from my own thoughts came these odd feelings that I could join her in my way – not as intelligently, not from a place of being as educated or well read, not from any of the places she has been, but from the places I have been. This, I would guess, is the whole point. Mari Perron, St. Paul, MN Review: Insight Into A Brilliant Mind - This book is a must read for anyone who is a Toni Morrison fan. Not only is she one of the best living writers in the world, but she is a good social critic. I enjoyed many of the essays featured in this book. Five stars!!!