February 8: The Origin of Others

What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America's foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. It's Toni Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.

America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books: Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.

If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood.

She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 20: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A new edition of the first novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye relates the story of Pecola Breedlove, an 11-year-old black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes, and the tragedy that results because of her longing to be accepted.

Pecola Breedlove prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.

Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife.

A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic The Bluest Eye asks powerful questions about race, class and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 29: Beloved by Toni Morrison

In the classic Beloved, an escaped slave named Sethe is living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, and is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent bookstore in Maryland.

February 17: Sula by Toni Morrison

The intense friendship shared by Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two African-American women raised in an Ohio town, changes forever when one of them leaves home to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal - or does it end?

Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a novel that overflows with life.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent bookstore in Maryland.