The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
by Toni Morrison
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About the Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that “speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR).
These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved,Paradise) and that of others.
An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
About the Author
Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
Editorial Reviews
“Morrison is more than the standard bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.” —The New York Times
“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.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“A piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race. . . . The book explodes into pure brilliance.” —The Boston Globe
“This book is a must.” —The Washington Post
“Profoundly insightful. . . . Speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines.” —NPR
“Moving. . . . Magnificent. . . . It’s a large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah. . . . With this book, one is tempted to quote at length from her words: her acuity and moral clarity are dazzling, but so is her vision for how we might find our way towards a less unjust, less hateful future.” —The Guardian
“Her critical mind is as original as her literary vision. . . . Morrison’s style is, for the most part, stately, not so much ornate as complex, not so much stentorian as insistent, authoritative, often fierce. . . . Morrison is not simply a narrative spellbinder. . . . She is also a thundering prophet for our time.” —Commonweal
“The Source of Self-Regard is a must-read.” —Essence
“Altogether fantastic. . . . One of the deepest seers of our time.” —Brain Pickings
“Give[s] insight into Morrison not just as a master of American folklore and the novel but also as a keen observer of humankind.” —Vogue