NEW YORK
To much of the world the late Toni Morrison was a novelist, celebrated for such classics as “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and “The Bluest Eye.” But the Nobel laureate did not confine herself to one kind of writing.
Book of Toni Morrison quotations is coming out in December
Morrison also completed plays, poems, essays, and short stories, one of which is coming out as a book on Feb. 1. “Recitatif,” written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen over the following decades, follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults. Zadie Smith contributes an introduction and the story’s audio edition is read by the actor Bahni Turpin.
According to Autumn M. Womack, a professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University (where Morrison taught for years), the author had written short fiction at least since her college years at Howard University and Cornell University, though she never published a story collection. “Recitatif” was included in the 1983 release “Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women,” co-edited by the poet-playwright Amiri Baraka and now out of print.
“One of the main takeaways from it (‘Recitatif’) is that you’ll begin to think of her as someone who experimented with form. You’ll get away from the idea that she was solely a novelist and think of her as someone who was trying all kinds of writing,” Womack said.
