Jazz, Toni Morrison
Jazz, Toni Morrison
3 Rating(s)
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Jazz

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Toni Morrison

Abridged: 3 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/10/2015

Synopsis

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.

“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).

"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women.” —The New York Times Book Review

About Toni Morrison

Possibly one of the best known and most talented Black authors, Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, was an American author, essayist, book editor, and college professor. She was born and grew up in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children of a working class family. Her parents had difficult childhoods, with her father having witnessed a lynching of two Black businessmen who lived on his street. It was a very traumatic experience for her father, so he ended up moving to Ohio where there were more industrial jobs being offered. When Toni was about two years old, their landlord set fire to their house for non-payment of rent. They were home at the time. They laughed at the incident which she later described "as how her family kept their integrity and claimed their own life".

Morrison read frequently the works of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She took the Baptismal name of Anthony, which led to her nickname, Toni. She attended Lorain High School where she was on the debate team, participated in drama productions, and assisted with the yearbook. She then graduated from Howard University in English and the classics. Continuing her education, she completed her Master's Degree in two years from Cornell University, writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

After graduating from Cornell, she settled in Texas, where she taught at Texas Southern University.

She has received about every prestigious award for her writing, which includes......The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved (which was made into a 1998 film), Jazz, Love, and A Mercy. Her highest honor was in 2012 when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on March 06, 2024

toni morrison books are like cookies (i tried and failed to have just one). this is the second book in the beloved trilogy, and therefore i had to read it after beloved, or at least theoretically did the Right Thing in doing so, but i wish i was weird and random and quirky and read them out of order.......more

Goodreads review by Candi on February 16, 2016

2 stars "I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the v......more

Goodreads review by mark on September 02, 2013

got lost in all the lovely words, loved getting lost. minor note but major emotions. narrative glides down perfect prose pathways and through poetic passages to different destinations, into one mind and out of another, into many minds, past future past future, man. who knows where the next road goes......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on February 08, 2023

Not quite a true 4 stars, but boy does Toni Morrison know how to end a story. (I felt this way about her novel, Love, too, which I read a couple years ago). She’ll reveal some detail that breaks open the heart of the story in a way that reaches across the divide of the specific people in time and pl......more

Goodreads review by Nandakishore on December 04, 2018

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went......more

Quotes

“Wonderful. . . . A brilliant, daring novel. . . . Every voice amazes.” —Chicago Tribune

“She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner.” —Newsweek

“[A] masterpiece. . . . She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Thrillingly written . . . seductive. . . . Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“A compelling blend of heart and language. . . . Resounds with passion.” —The Boston Globe

“Marvelous. . . . Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.” —Vogue

“The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women.” —Edna O’Brien, The New York Times Book Review

“She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation—that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved. . . . Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —Glamour

“She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart.” —John Leonard, National Public Radio

“A masterpiece. . . . A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion. . . . Mesmerizing.” —Cosmopolitan

“Lyrically brooding. . . . One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator’s mind.” —The New York Times

“Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious.” —People

Awards

  • ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age
  • Nobel Prize
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