Song of Solomon (Everyman's Library) - Hardcover

Toni Morrison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445048 ISBN 13: 9780679445043

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1995

 

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

 

Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.

Review:

The third novel from one America's most powerful writers turns 20 years old in 1997, but Song of Solomon long ago ascended to the top shelf in the ranks of great literature. This Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the Nobel Prize-winning Morrison's lyrical, powerful, and erudite novel contains a chronology that situates the book in its historical context, and an introduction from author Reynolds Price.

From the Publisher:

"A stunningly beautiful book . . . I would call the book poetry, but that would seem to be denying its considerable power as a story. Whatever name you give it, it's full of magnificent people, each of them complex and multilayered, even the narrowest of them narrow in extravagant ways."
--Anne Tyler
Washington Post Book World

"Morrison's prose is a delight, full of the lyrical variety and allusiveness that distinguish a rich folkloric tradition. Her real gift, though, is for characterization, and Song of Solomon is peopled with an amazing collection of losers and fighters, innocents and murderers, followers of ghosts and followers of money, all of whom add to the pleasure of this exceptionally diverse novel."
--The Atlantic Monthly

"Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstance and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs."
--The New Yorker

"Exuberant . . . An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and a national heritage."
--Time

"A fine novel exuberantly constructed . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny."
--The Hudson Review

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679445048
• ISBN 13: 9780679445043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384