On Morrison

‘Breathtaking, provocative and refreshing’ IMANI PERRY
‘A literary miracle’ KIESE LAYMON

The essential companion to Toni Morrison’s work, written by Namwali Serpell, ‘one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today’ (Financial Times)

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and most beloved of writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, ‘she is our only truly canonical black, female writer – and her work is highly complex.’ In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and professor to illuminate Toni Morrison’s masterful experiments with literary form.

This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her vivid fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry – with contextual guidance and original close readings. Accessible and thrillingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American contemporary authors of our time, but how to approach any great work of literature. The conversation between the two black women artist-readers that rises from these pages is stylish, edifying and spectacular in its scope and erudition.

‘Stunning reconsiderations of Morrison… incisive, tender, and also honest and unsparing’ HANIF ABDURRAQIB, author of A Little Devil in America

Author Biography

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected as one of The New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of criticism, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.