Promotional Information

The most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

Table of Contents

Peril

Part I THE FOREIGNER’S HOME
The Dead of September 11
The Foreigner’s Home
Racism and Fascism
Home
Wartalk
The War on Error
A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed
Moral Inhabitants
The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
The Habit of Art
The Individual Artist
Arts Advocacy
Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address
The Slavebody and the Blackbody
Harlem on My Mind: Contesting Memory—
     Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration
Women, Race, and Memory
Literature and Public Life
The Nobel Lecture in Literature
Cinderella’s Stepsisters
The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations

Interlude BLACK MATTER(S)
Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
Race Matters
Black Matter(s)
Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
      The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
Academic Whispers 
Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes 
Hard, True, and Lasting 

Part II GOD’S LANGUAGE
James Baldwin Eulogy
The Site of Memory
God’s Language
Grendel and His Mother
The Writer Before the Page
The Trouble with Paradise
On Beloved
Chinua Achebe
Introduction of Peter Sellars
Tribute to Romare Bearden
Faulkner and Women
The Source of Self-Regard
Rememory
Memory, Creation, and Fiction
Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell
Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading

Sources

About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of twelve novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

Reviews

“Close your eyes and make a wish. Wish that one of the most informed, smartest, most successful people in your profession walks into your living room, pulls up a chair and says, “This is what I’ve been thinking. …” That’s “The Source of Self-Regard… The bursts of rumination examine world history, skirt religion, scour philosophy, racism, anti-Semitism, femininity, war and folk tales…There’s even a tidbit or two about her closely guarded personal life. But the real magic is witnessing her mind and imagination at work… This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.”
—James McBride, New York Times
 
“The Source of Self-Regard speaks to today's social and political moment as directly as this morning's headlines... Morrison tackles headfirst the weighty issues that have long troubled America's conscience... profoundly insightful.”
—NPR
 
“Clearly we do not deserve Morrison, and clearly we need her badly...In this collection of nonfiction written over the past four decades, the revered (and sometimes controversial) author reinforces her status as a piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race... the book explodes into pure brilliance... [It is Morrison’s] definitive statement.”
—The Boston Globe

"Dazzlingly heady and deeply personal—a rumination on her literary career and artistic mission, which is to reveal and honor the aching beauty and unfolding drama of African American life... Have there been many minds more intriguing, or writers more sublimely challenging? The Source of Self-Regard excavates Morrison's vast well of knowledge. Open its pages and receive."
—O Magazine
 
"In an era when complex ideas are reduced to slogans and tweets, when language is dumbed down and truth so often debased, The Source of Self-Regard moves with courage and assurance in the opposite direction. What a gift."
—The Tampa Bay Times

"Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art... Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"Morrison turns a critical eye on race, social politics, money, feminism, culture, and the press, with the essential mandate that each of us bears the responsibility for reaching beyond our superficial identities and circumstances for a closer look at what it means to be human."
—Booklist (starred review)

"Some superb pieces headline this rich collection...Prescient and highly relevant to the present political moment..."
—Publishers Weekly