Penguin Random House Secondary Education
Elementary Secondary Higher Ed

Secondary Education Inspire Teaching and Learning with Outstanding Books


Guides

Collections

News
(0)
Wish List
(0)
Wish List
  • Secondary Education

    Inspire Teaching and Learning with Outstanding Books

    • English Language Arts
        • English Language Arts
        • Genre: Fiction
        • Genre: Nonfiction
        • Genre: Drama
        • Genre: Poetry
        • Genre: Literary Criticism
        •  
        • Literature: American
        • Literature: British & Commonwealth
        • Literature: Comparative & World
        •  
        • Communication
        • Writing & Composition
        • ESL / ELL

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Social Studies & History
        • Social Studies
        • Anthropology
        • Civics & Government
        • Economics, Business, and Finance
        • Geography
        • Philosophy & Ethics
        • Psychology
        • Sociology
        • History
        • European History
        • Historiography
        • Topical History
        • United States History
        • Wars, Conflicts, and Events
        • World History

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • STEAM / STEM
        • Science
        • Applied Sciences
        • Astronomy
        • Biology & Life Sciences
        • Earth Science
        • Engineering
        • Environmental Science & Issues
        • Essays
        • Experiments, Projects, and Makerspace
        • History of Science
        • Physical Science
        • References
        • Research & Methodology
        • Scientists, Inventors, & Discoveries
        • The Arts
        • Architecture
        • Art
        • Fashion
        • Media Studies
        • Music
        • Performing Arts
        • Math
        • Algebra
        • Arithmetic
        • Calculus
        • Geometry
        • Precalculus
        • Probability & Statistics
        • Quantitative Reasoning
        • More Math…
        • Computer & IT
        • Artificial Intelligence
        • Coding & Programming
        • Computer Education
        • Computer Science Principles
        • Cyber Security
        • Design & User Experience (UX)
        • Entertainment & Games
        • Ethics
        • History of IT
        • Internet / The Web
        • Networking
        • Operating Systems
        • Software Manuals
        • More Computers & IT…

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Books in Spanish & World Languages
        • Books in Spanish & World Languages
        • Books in Spanish
        • World Languages

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Study Aids & Exam Prep
        • Study Aids & Exam Prep
        • College Entrance Exams
        • High School Exams

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • More Disciplines
        • Health, Sports, Games, and Crafts
        • Cooking & Nutrition
        • Crafts & Makerspace
        • Games & Activities
        • Health & Wellness
        • Physical Education
        • Religious Studies & Spirituality
        • Agnostic & Atheist
        • Buddhism
        • Christianity
        • Comparative Religion
        • Confucianism
        • Hindu
        • Islam
        • Judaism
        • Notable People in Religious Studies & Spirituality
        • Taoism
        • Visionary & Metaphysical
        • Education & Professional Learning
        • Child and Adolescent Development
        • Classroom Management
        • Counseling
        • Pedagogy & Methodology
        • Schools and Education
        • Special Education
        • References
        • Almanacs
        • Atlases, Gazetteers, and Maps
        • Bibliographies & Indexes
        • Dictionaries
        • Encyclopedias
        • Research Materials
        • Style Manuals
        • Thesauruses
        • Word Lists
        • Writing Skills

          • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Guides
    • Collections
    • News
    • Other Penguin Random House Education Sites
    • Elementary Ed
    • Higher Ed
Are you still there?
If not, we’ll close this session in:
Download high-resolution image Look inside

Sula

Part of Vintage International

Author Toni Morrison
Look inside
Paperback
$16.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.19"W x 7.95"H x 0.53"D  
On sale Jun 08, 2004 | 192 Pages | 978-1-4000-3343-0
| Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
See Additional Formats
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > People & Places by Group > African American
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > People & Places by Group > Girls & Women
  • English Language Arts > Literature: American > 20th Century
  • About
  • Author
  • Excerpt
  • Awards
  • Praise
Winner of the Nobel Prize 

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written—as John Leonard said in The New York Times—in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."

Sula has the same power, the same beauty.

At its center—a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel—both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town—meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.

Through their girlhood years they share everything—perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime—until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.

Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks—where you deal with evil by surviving it.

Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance). . . that a child drowned in the river years ago. . . that there was a plague of robins when she first returned. 

In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.
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. View titles by Toni Morrison
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it wasn't a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills--collecting rent or insurance payments--he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of "messing around" to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew's curve, He'd have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew's and let the tenor's voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain.

A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they came to be where they were.

A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they're looking for a little comfort somewhere. The kind colored folks tell on themselves when the rain in doesn't come, or comes for weeks, and they're looking for a little comfort somehow.

A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy--the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn't want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the Bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said, "Oh, no! See those hills? That's bottom land, rich and fertile."

"But it's high up in the hills," said the slave.

"High up from us," said the master, "but when God looks down, it's the bottom. That's why we call it so. It's the bottom of heaven-best land there is."

So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to the valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter.

Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks.

Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there sometimes wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it was the bottom of heaven.

The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things-and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom.


1919

Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since 1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only celebrant. Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917, he had returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged, and even the most fastidious people in the town sometimes caught themselves dreaming of what he must have been like a few years back before he went off to war. A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick, Shadrack had found himself in December, 1917, running with his comrades across a field in France. It was his first encounter with the enemy and he didn't know whether his company was running toward them or away. For several days they had been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges. At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions. Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was something called it, he could not muster up the proper feeling--the feeling that would accommodate it. He expected to be terrified or exhilarated--to feel something very strong. In fact, he felt only the bite of a nail in his boot, which pierced the ball of his foot whenever he came down on it. The day was cold enough to make his breath visible, and he wondered for a moment at the purity and whiteness of his own breath among the dirty, gray explosions surrounding him. He ran, bayonet fixed, deep in the great sweep of men flying across this field. Wincing at the pain in his foot, he turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back.



When Shadrack opened his eyes he was propped up in a small bed. Before him on a tray was a large tin plate divided into three triangles. In one triangle was rice, in another meat, and in the third stewed tomatoes. A small round depression held a cup of whitish liquid. Shadrack stared at the soft colors that filled these triangles: the lumpy whiteness of rice, the quivering blood tomatoes, the grayish-brown meat. All their repugnance was contained in the neat balance of the triangles--a balance that soothed him, transferred some of its equilibrium to him. Thus reassured that the white, the red and the brown would stay where they were--would not explode or burst forth from their restricted zones--he suddenly felt hungry and looked around for his hands. His glance was cautious at first, for he had to be very careful--anything could be anywhere. Then he noticed two lumps beneath the beige blanket on either side of his hips. With extreme care he lifted one arm and was relieved to find his hand attached to his wrist. He tried the other and found it also. Slowly he directed one hand toward the cup and, just as he was about to spread his fingers, they began to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk all over the tray and the bed. With a shriek he closed his eyes and thrust his huge growing hands under the covers. Once out of sight they seemed to shrink back to their normal size. But the yell had brought a male nurse.

"Private? We're not going to have any trouble today, are we? Are we, Private?

Shadrack looked up at a balding man dressed in a green-cotton jacket and trousers. His hair was parted low on the right side so that some twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of his head.

"Come on. Pick up that spoon. Pick it up, Private. Nobody is going to feed you forever."

Sweat slid from Shadrack's armpits down his sides. He could not bear to see his hands grow again and he was frightened of the voice in the apple-green suit.

"Pick it up, I said. There's no point to this. The nurse reached under the cover for Shadrack's wrist to pull out the monstrous hand. Shadrack jerked it back and overturned the tray. In panic he raised himself to his knees and tried to fling off and away his terrible fingers, but succeeded only in knocking the nurse into the next bed.

When they bound Shadrack into a straitjacket, he was both relieved and grateful, for his hands were at last hidden and confined to whatever size they had attained.

Laced and silent in his small bed, he tried to tie the loose cords in his mind. He wanted desperately to see his own face and connect it with the word "private"--the word the nurse (and the others who helped bind him) had called him. "Private" he thought was something secret, and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret. Still, if his hands behaved as they had done, what might he expect from his face? The fear and longing were too much for him, so he began to think of other things. That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave mouths of memory it chose.

He saw a window that looked out on a river which he knew was full of fish. Someone was speaking softly just outside the door . . .



Shadrack's earlier violence had coincided with a memorandum from the hospital executive staff in reference to the distribution of patients in high-risk areas. There was clearly a demand for space. The priority or the violence earned Shadrack his release, $217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official-looking papers.

When he stepped out of the hospital door the grounds overwhelmed him: the cropped shrubbery, the edged lawns, the undeviating walks. Shadrack looked at the cement stretches: each one leading clearheadedly to some presumably desirable destination. There were no fences, no warnings, no obstacles at all between concrete and green grass, so one could easily ignore the tidy sweep of stone and cut out in another direction--a direction of one's own.

Shadrack stood at the foot of the hospital steps watching the heads of trees tossing ruefully but harmlessly, since their trunks were rooted too deeply in the earth to threaten him. Only the walks made him uneasy. He shifted his weight, wondering how he could get to the gate without stepping on the concrete. While plotting his course--where he would have to leap, where to skirt a clump of bushes--a loud guffaw startled him. Two men were going up the steps. Then he noticed that there were many people about, and that he was just now seeing them, or else they had just materialized. They were thin slips, like paper dolls floating down the walks. Some were seated in chairs with wheels, propelled by other paper figures from behind. All seemed to be smoking, and their arms and legs curved in the breeze. A good high wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps among the tops of the trees.

Shadrack took the plunge. Four steps and he was on the grass heading for the gate. He kept his head down to avoid seeing the paper people swerving and bending here and there, and he lost his way. When he looked up, he was standing by a low red building separated from the main building by a covered walkway. From somewhere came a sweetish smell which reminded him of something painful. He looked around for the gate and saw that he had gone directly away from it in his complicated journey over the grass. Just to the left of the low building was a graveled driveway that appeared to lead outside the grounds. He trotted quickly to it and left, at last, a haven of more than a year, only eight days of which he fully recollected.

Once on the road, he headed west. The long stay in the hospital had left him weak--too weak to walk steadily on the gravel shoulders of the road. He shuffled, grew dizzy, stopped for breath, started again, stumbling and sweating but refusing to wipe his temples, still afraid to look at his hands. Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their eyes at what they took to be a drunken man.

The sun was already directly over his head when he came to a town. A few blocks of shaded streets and he was already at its heart--a pretty, quietly regulated downtown.

Exhausted, his feet clotted with pain, he sat down at the curbside to take off his shoes. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing his hands and fumbled with the laces of the heavy high-topped shoes. The nurse had tied them into a double knot, the way one does for children, and Shadrack, long unaccustomed to the manipulation of intricate things, could not get them loose. Uncoordinated, his fingernails tore away at the knots. He fought a rising hysteria that was not merely anxiety to free his aching feet; his very life depended on the release of the knots. Suddenly without raising his eyelids, he began to cry. Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't even know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the door . . .

Through his tears he saw the fingers joining the laces, tentatively at first, then rapidly. The four fingers of each hand fused into the fabric, knotted themselves and zigzagged in and out of the tiny eyeholes.

By the time the police drove up, Shadrack was suffering from a blinding headache, which was not abated by the comfort he felt when the policemen pulled his hands away from what he thought was a permanent entanglement with his shoelaces. They took him to jail, booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell. Lying on a cot, Shadrack could only stare helplessly at the wall, so paralyzing was the pain in his head. He lay in this agony for a long while and then realized he was staring at the painted-over letters of a command to fuck himself. He studied the phrase as the pain in his head subsided.

Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated itself: his earlier desire to see his own face. He looked for a mirror; there was none. Finally, keeping his hands carefully behind his back he made his way to the toilet bowl and peeped in. The water was unevenly lit by the sun so he could make nothing out. Returning to his cot he took the blanket and covered his head, rendering the water dark enough to see his reflection. There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him. He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real--that he didn't exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. In his joy he took the risk of letting one edge of the blanket drop and glanced at his hands. They were still. Courteously still.

Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.

The sheriff looked through the bars at the young man with the matted hair. He had read through his prisoner's papers and hailed a farmer. When Shadrack awoke, the sheriff handed him back his papers and escorted him to the back of a wagon. Shadrack got in and in less than three hours he was back in Medallion, for he had been only twenty-two miles from his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the door.

In the back of the wagon, supported by sacks of squash and hills of pumpkins, Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.



On the third day of the new year, he walked through the Bottom down Carpenter's Road with a cowbell and a hangman's rope calling the people together. Telling them that this was their only chance to kill themselves or each other.

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. His eyes were so wild, his hair so long and matted, his voice was so full of authority and thunder that he caused panic on the first, or Charter, National Suicide Day in 1920. The next one, in 1921, was less frightening but still worrisome. The people had seen him a year now in between. He lived in a shack on the riverbank that had once belonged to his grandfather long time dead. On Tuesday and Friday he sold the fish he had caught that morning, the rest of the week he was drunk, loud, obscene, funny and outrageous. But he never touched anybody, never fought, never caressed. Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Then, on subsequent National Suicide Days, the grown people looked out from behind curtains as he rang his bell; a few stragglers increased their speed, and little children screamed and ran. The tetter heads tried goading him (although he was only four or five years older then they) but not for long, for his curses were stingingly personal.

As time went along, the people took less notice of these January thirds, or rather they thought they did, thought they had no attitudes or feelings one way or another about Shadrack's annual solitary parade. In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives.

Someone said to a friend, "You sure was a long time delivering that baby. How long was you in labor?"

And the friend answered, "'Bout three days. The pains started on Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday. Was borned on Sunday. All my boys is Sunday boys."

Some lover said to his bride-to-be, "Let's do it after New Years, 'stead of before. I get paid New Year's Eve."

And his sweetheart answered, "OK, but make sure it ain't on Suicide Day. I ain't 'bout to be listening to no cowbells whilst the weddin's going on."

Somebody's grandmother said her hens always started a laying of double yolks right after Suicide Day.

Then Reverend Deal took it up, saying the same folks who had sense enough to avoid Shadrack's call were the ones who insisted on drinking themselves to death or womanizing themselves to death. "May's well go on with Shad and save the Lamb the trouble of redemption."

Easily, quietly, Suicide Day became a part of the fabric of life up in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio.
Copyright © 1973 by Toni Morrison. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • WINNER | 1998
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize
“Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.” —The New York Times

“Exemplary. . . . The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy.” —Newsweek

“In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison’s originality and power emerge.” —The Nation

“Enchanting. . . . Powerful.” —Chicago Daily News

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time. . . . [Morrison] is a major talent.” —Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune

“As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist . . . written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache.” —Playboy

“In the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Toni Morrison’s gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity.” —Library Journal

“Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere.” —Los Angeles Free Press

About

Winner of the Nobel Prize 

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written—as John Leonard said in The New York Times—in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."

Sula has the same power, the same beauty.

At its center—a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel—both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town—meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.

Through their girlhood years they share everything—perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime—until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.

Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks—where you deal with evil by surviving it.

Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance). . . that a child drowned in the river years ago. . . that there was a plague of robins when she first returned. 

In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.

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. View titles by Toni Morrison

Excerpt

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it wasn't a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills--collecting rent or insurance payments--he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of "messing around" to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew's curve, He'd have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew's and let the tenor's voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain.

A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they came to be where they were.

A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they're looking for a little comfort somewhere. The kind colored folks tell on themselves when the rain in doesn't come, or comes for weeks, and they're looking for a little comfort somehow.

A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy--the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn't want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the Bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said, "Oh, no! See those hills? That's bottom land, rich and fertile."

"But it's high up in the hills," said the slave.

"High up from us," said the master, "but when God looks down, it's the bottom. That's why we call it so. It's the bottom of heaven-best land there is."

So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to the valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter.

Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks.

Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there sometimes wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it was the bottom of heaven.

The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things-and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom.


1919

Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since 1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only celebrant. Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917, he had returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged, and even the most fastidious people in the town sometimes caught themselves dreaming of what he must have been like a few years back before he went off to war. A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick, Shadrack had found himself in December, 1917, running with his comrades across a field in France. It was his first encounter with the enemy and he didn't know whether his company was running toward them or away. For several days they had been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges. At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions. Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was something called it, he could not muster up the proper feeling--the feeling that would accommodate it. He expected to be terrified or exhilarated--to feel something very strong. In fact, he felt only the bite of a nail in his boot, which pierced the ball of his foot whenever he came down on it. The day was cold enough to make his breath visible, and he wondered for a moment at the purity and whiteness of his own breath among the dirty, gray explosions surrounding him. He ran, bayonet fixed, deep in the great sweep of men flying across this field. Wincing at the pain in his foot, he turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back.



When Shadrack opened his eyes he was propped up in a small bed. Before him on a tray was a large tin plate divided into three triangles. In one triangle was rice, in another meat, and in the third stewed tomatoes. A small round depression held a cup of whitish liquid. Shadrack stared at the soft colors that filled these triangles: the lumpy whiteness of rice, the quivering blood tomatoes, the grayish-brown meat. All their repugnance was contained in the neat balance of the triangles--a balance that soothed him, transferred some of its equilibrium to him. Thus reassured that the white, the red and the brown would stay where they were--would not explode or burst forth from their restricted zones--he suddenly felt hungry and looked around for his hands. His glance was cautious at first, for he had to be very careful--anything could be anywhere. Then he noticed two lumps beneath the beige blanket on either side of his hips. With extreme care he lifted one arm and was relieved to find his hand attached to his wrist. He tried the other and found it also. Slowly he directed one hand toward the cup and, just as he was about to spread his fingers, they began to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk all over the tray and the bed. With a shriek he closed his eyes and thrust his huge growing hands under the covers. Once out of sight they seemed to shrink back to their normal size. But the yell had brought a male nurse.

"Private? We're not going to have any trouble today, are we? Are we, Private?

Shadrack looked up at a balding man dressed in a green-cotton jacket and trousers. His hair was parted low on the right side so that some twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of his head.

"Come on. Pick up that spoon. Pick it up, Private. Nobody is going to feed you forever."

Sweat slid from Shadrack's armpits down his sides. He could not bear to see his hands grow again and he was frightened of the voice in the apple-green suit.

"Pick it up, I said. There's no point to this. The nurse reached under the cover for Shadrack's wrist to pull out the monstrous hand. Shadrack jerked it back and overturned the tray. In panic he raised himself to his knees and tried to fling off and away his terrible fingers, but succeeded only in knocking the nurse into the next bed.

When they bound Shadrack into a straitjacket, he was both relieved and grateful, for his hands were at last hidden and confined to whatever size they had attained.

Laced and silent in his small bed, he tried to tie the loose cords in his mind. He wanted desperately to see his own face and connect it with the word "private"--the word the nurse (and the others who helped bind him) had called him. "Private" he thought was something secret, and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret. Still, if his hands behaved as they had done, what might he expect from his face? The fear and longing were too much for him, so he began to think of other things. That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave mouths of memory it chose.

He saw a window that looked out on a river which he knew was full of fish. Someone was speaking softly just outside the door . . .



Shadrack's earlier violence had coincided with a memorandum from the hospital executive staff in reference to the distribution of patients in high-risk areas. There was clearly a demand for space. The priority or the violence earned Shadrack his release, $217 in cash, a full suit of clothes and copies of very official-looking papers.

When he stepped out of the hospital door the grounds overwhelmed him: the cropped shrubbery, the edged lawns, the undeviating walks. Shadrack looked at the cement stretches: each one leading clearheadedly to some presumably desirable destination. There were no fences, no warnings, no obstacles at all between concrete and green grass, so one could easily ignore the tidy sweep of stone and cut out in another direction--a direction of one's own.

Shadrack stood at the foot of the hospital steps watching the heads of trees tossing ruefully but harmlessly, since their trunks were rooted too deeply in the earth to threaten him. Only the walks made him uneasy. He shifted his weight, wondering how he could get to the gate without stepping on the concrete. While plotting his course--where he would have to leap, where to skirt a clump of bushes--a loud guffaw startled him. Two men were going up the steps. Then he noticed that there were many people about, and that he was just now seeing them, or else they had just materialized. They were thin slips, like paper dolls floating down the walks. Some were seated in chairs with wheels, propelled by other paper figures from behind. All seemed to be smoking, and their arms and legs curved in the breeze. A good high wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps among the tops of the trees.

Shadrack took the plunge. Four steps and he was on the grass heading for the gate. He kept his head down to avoid seeing the paper people swerving and bending here and there, and he lost his way. When he looked up, he was standing by a low red building separated from the main building by a covered walkway. From somewhere came a sweetish smell which reminded him of something painful. He looked around for the gate and saw that he had gone directly away from it in his complicated journey over the grass. Just to the left of the low building was a graveled driveway that appeared to lead outside the grounds. He trotted quickly to it and left, at last, a haven of more than a year, only eight days of which he fully recollected.

Once on the road, he headed west. The long stay in the hospital had left him weak--too weak to walk steadily on the gravel shoulders of the road. He shuffled, grew dizzy, stopped for breath, started again, stumbling and sweating but refusing to wipe his temples, still afraid to look at his hands. Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their eyes at what they took to be a drunken man.

The sun was already directly over his head when he came to a town. A few blocks of shaded streets and he was already at its heart--a pretty, quietly regulated downtown.

Exhausted, his feet clotted with pain, he sat down at the curbside to take off his shoes. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing his hands and fumbled with the laces of the heavy high-topped shoes. The nurse had tied them into a double knot, the way one does for children, and Shadrack, long unaccustomed to the manipulation of intricate things, could not get them loose. Uncoordinated, his fingernails tore away at the knots. He fought a rising hysteria that was not merely anxiety to free his aching feet; his very life depended on the release of the knots. Suddenly without raising his eyelids, he began to cry. Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't even know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the door . . .

Through his tears he saw the fingers joining the laces, tentatively at first, then rapidly. The four fingers of each hand fused into the fabric, knotted themselves and zigzagged in and out of the tiny eyeholes.

By the time the police drove up, Shadrack was suffering from a blinding headache, which was not abated by the comfort he felt when the policemen pulled his hands away from what he thought was a permanent entanglement with his shoelaces. They took him to jail, booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell. Lying on a cot, Shadrack could only stare helplessly at the wall, so paralyzing was the pain in his head. He lay in this agony for a long while and then realized he was staring at the painted-over letters of a command to fuck himself. He studied the phrase as the pain in his head subsided.

Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated itself: his earlier desire to see his own face. He looked for a mirror; there was none. Finally, keeping his hands carefully behind his back he made his way to the toilet bowl and peeped in. The water was unevenly lit by the sun so he could make nothing out. Returning to his cot he took the blanket and covered his head, rendering the water dark enough to see his reflection. There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him. He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real--that he didn't exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. In his joy he took the risk of letting one edge of the blanket drop and glanced at his hands. They were still. Courteously still.

Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.

The sheriff looked through the bars at the young man with the matted hair. He had read through his prisoner's papers and hailed a farmer. When Shadrack awoke, the sheriff handed him back his papers and escorted him to the back of a wagon. Shadrack got in and in less than three hours he was back in Medallion, for he had been only twenty-two miles from his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the door.

In the back of the wagon, supported by sacks of squash and hills of pumpkins, Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.



On the third day of the new year, he walked through the Bottom down Carpenter's Road with a cowbell and a hangman's rope calling the people together. Telling them that this was their only chance to kill themselves or each other.

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. His eyes were so wild, his hair so long and matted, his voice was so full of authority and thunder that he caused panic on the first, or Charter, National Suicide Day in 1920. The next one, in 1921, was less frightening but still worrisome. The people had seen him a year now in between. He lived in a shack on the riverbank that had once belonged to his grandfather long time dead. On Tuesday and Friday he sold the fish he had caught that morning, the rest of the week he was drunk, loud, obscene, funny and outrageous. But he never touched anybody, never fought, never caressed. Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Then, on subsequent National Suicide Days, the grown people looked out from behind curtains as he rang his bell; a few stragglers increased their speed, and little children screamed and ran. The tetter heads tried goading him (although he was only four or five years older then they) but not for long, for his curses were stingingly personal.

As time went along, the people took less notice of these January thirds, or rather they thought they did, thought they had no attitudes or feelings one way or another about Shadrack's annual solitary parade. In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives.

Someone said to a friend, "You sure was a long time delivering that baby. How long was you in labor?"

And the friend answered, "'Bout three days. The pains started on Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday. Was borned on Sunday. All my boys is Sunday boys."

Some lover said to his bride-to-be, "Let's do it after New Years, 'stead of before. I get paid New Year's Eve."

And his sweetheart answered, "OK, but make sure it ain't on Suicide Day. I ain't 'bout to be listening to no cowbells whilst the weddin's going on."

Somebody's grandmother said her hens always started a laying of double yolks right after Suicide Day.

Then Reverend Deal took it up, saying the same folks who had sense enough to avoid Shadrack's call were the ones who insisted on drinking themselves to death or womanizing themselves to death. "May's well go on with Shad and save the Lamb the trouble of redemption."

Easily, quietly, Suicide Day became a part of the fabric of life up in the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio.
Copyright © 1973 by Toni Morrison. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • WINNER | 1998
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 1993
    Nobel Prize

Praise

“Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.” —The New York Times

“Exemplary. . . . The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy.” —Newsweek

“In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison’s originality and power emerge.” —The Nation

“Enchanting. . . . Powerful.” —Chicago Daily News

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time. . . . [Morrison] is a major talent.” —Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune

“As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist . . . written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache.” —Playboy

“In the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Toni Morrison’s gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity.” —Library Journal

“Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere.” —Los Angeles Free Press

Additional formats

  • Sula
    Sula
    Toni Morrison
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Apr 05, 2002
  • Sula
    Sula
    Toni Morrison
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Apr 05, 2002

Other books in this series

  • More Than I Love My Life
    More Than I Love My Life
    A novel
    David Grossman
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 12, 2022
  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 26, 2022
  • Trio
    Trio
    A novel
    William Boyd
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 08, 2022
  • Klara and the Sun
    Klara and the Sun
    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Antiquities and Other Stories
    Antiquities and Other Stories
    Cynthia Ozick
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Joan Didion
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Palimpsest
    Palimpsest
    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 16, 2021
  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • Here We Are
    Here We Are
    A novel
    Graham Swift
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2021
  • The Fire Next Time
    The Fire Next Time
    James Baldwin
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Juneteenth
    Juneteenth
    A Novel
    Ralph Ellison
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 25, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2021
  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 22, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 02, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 28, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 01, 2018
  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
    Keeping an Eye Open
    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 07, 2017
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 03, 2016
  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 08, 2015
  • The Prophet
    The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Jul 21, 2015
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 05, 2015
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The News: A User's Manual
    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Giovanni's Room
    Giovanni's Room
    James Baldwin
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 2013
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    James Baldwin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 2013
  • Dear Life
    Dear Life
    Stories
    Alice Munro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 30, 2013
  • The Complete Stories
    The Complete Stories
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 07, 2013
  • In Cold Blood
    In Cold Blood
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 19, 2013
  • 1Q84
    1Q84
    Haruki Murakami
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 22, 2013
  • Religion for Atheists
    Religion for Atheists
    A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
    Alain De Botton
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2013
  • Home
    Home
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 01, 2013
  • Through the Window
    Through the Window
    Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
    Julian Barnes
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 20, 2012
  • The Remains of the Day
    The Remains of the Day
    Introduction by Salman Rushdie
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Cat's Table
    The Cat's Table
    Michael Ondaatje
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Jun 12, 2012
  • The Sense of an Ending
    The Sense of an Ending
    Julian Barnes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 29, 2012
  • I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    Maxine Hong Kingston
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 14, 2012
  • The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
    Orhan Pamuk
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 01, 2011
  • The Masque of Africa
    The Masque of Africa
    Glimpses of African Belief
    V. S. Naipaul
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • Nemesis
    Nemesis
    Philip Roth
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The English Patient
    The English Patient
    Introduction by Pico Iyer
    Michael Ondaatje
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Cross of Redemption
    The Cross of Redemption
    Uncollected Writings
    James Baldwin
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 06, 2011
  • Ransom
    Ransom
    A Novel
    David Malouf
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2011
  • On the Beach
    On the Beach
    Nevil Shute
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2010
  • MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    A Play
    Athol Fugard
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2009
  • Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    A Dual-Language Edition
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 2009
  • A Mercy
    A Mercy
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 11, 2009
  • Dispatches
    Dispatches
    Introduction by Robert Stone
    Michael Herr
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 17, 2009
  • Travels with Herodotus
    Travels with Herodotus
    Ryszard Kapuscinski
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 10, 2008
  • The Architecture of Happiness
    The Architecture of Happiness
    Alain De Botton
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 08, 2008
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 05, 2007
  • The Bluest Eye
    The Bluest Eye
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    May 08, 2007
  • The Road
    The Road
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 28, 2007
  • Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    W. H. Auden
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 13, 2007
  • No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 11, 2006
  • Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
    Giles Foden
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Last Night
    Last Night
    James Salter
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Never Let Me Go
    Never Let Me Go
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Kafka on the Shore
    Kafka on the Shore
    Haruki Murakami
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2006
  • The Plot Against America
    The Plot Against America
    Philip Roth
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 27, 2005
  • Too Brief a Treat
    Too Brief a Treat
    The Letters of Truman Capote
    Truman Capote
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2005
  • Status Anxiety
    Status Anxiety
    Alain De Botton
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 10, 2005
  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The City and the Pillar
    The City and the Pillar
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2003
  • The Razor's Edge
    The Razor's Edge
    W. Somerset Maugham
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 09, 2003
  • Julian
    Julian
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 12, 2003
  • You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    Alessandro Boffa
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 17, 2003
  • Selected Essays of John Berger
    Selected Essays of John Berger
    John Berger
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • The Shape of a Pocket
    The Shape of a Pocket
    John Berger
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • A New World Order
    A New World Order
    Essays
    Caryl Phillips
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 30, 2002
  • A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Novel
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • The Shadow of the Sun
    The Shadow of the Sun
    Ryszard Kapuscinski
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • A Fine Balance
    A Fine Balance
    Rohinton Mistry
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 30, 2001
  • Quarrel & Quandary
    Quarrel & Quandary
    Essays
    Cynthia Ozick
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 13, 2001
  • More Than I Love My Life
    More Than I Love My Life
    A novel
    David Grossman
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 12, 2022
  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 26, 2022
  • Trio
    Trio
    A novel
    William Boyd
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 08, 2022
  • Klara and the Sun
    Klara and the Sun
    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Antiquities and Other Stories
    Antiquities and Other Stories
    Cynthia Ozick
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Joan Didion
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Palimpsest
    Palimpsest
    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 16, 2021
  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • Here We Are
    Here We Are
    A novel
    Graham Swift
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2021
  • The Fire Next Time
    The Fire Next Time
    James Baldwin
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Juneteenth
    Juneteenth
    A Novel
    Ralph Ellison
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 25, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2021
  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 22, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 02, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 28, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 01, 2018
  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
    Keeping an Eye Open
    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 07, 2017
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 03, 2016
  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 08, 2015
  • The Prophet
    The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Jul 21, 2015
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 05, 2015
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The News: A User's Manual
    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Giovanni's Room
    Giovanni's Room
    James Baldwin
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 2013
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    James Baldwin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 2013
  • Dear Life
    Dear Life
    Stories
    Alice Munro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 30, 2013
  • The Complete Stories
    The Complete Stories
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 07, 2013
  • In Cold Blood
    In Cold Blood
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 19, 2013
  • 1Q84
    1Q84
    Haruki Murakami
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 22, 2013
  • Religion for Atheists
    Religion for Atheists
    A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
    Alain De Botton
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2013
  • Home
    Home
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 01, 2013
  • Through the Window
    Through the Window
    Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
    Julian Barnes
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 20, 2012
  • The Remains of the Day
    The Remains of the Day
    Introduction by Salman Rushdie
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Cat's Table
    The Cat's Table
    Michael Ondaatje
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Jun 12, 2012
  • The Sense of an Ending
    The Sense of an Ending
    Julian Barnes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 29, 2012
  • I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    Maxine Hong Kingston
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 14, 2012
  • The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
    Orhan Pamuk
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 01, 2011
  • The Masque of Africa
    The Masque of Africa
    Glimpses of African Belief
    V. S. Naipaul
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • Nemesis
    Nemesis
    Philip Roth
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The English Patient
    The English Patient
    Introduction by Pico Iyer
    Michael Ondaatje
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Cross of Redemption
    The Cross of Redemption
    Uncollected Writings
    James Baldwin
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 06, 2011
  • Ransom
    Ransom
    A Novel
    David Malouf
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2011
  • On the Beach
    On the Beach
    Nevil Shute
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2010
  • MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    A Play
    Athol Fugard
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2009
  • Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    A Dual-Language Edition
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 2009
  • A Mercy
    A Mercy
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 11, 2009
  • Dispatches
    Dispatches
    Introduction by Robert Stone
    Michael Herr
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 17, 2009
  • Travels with Herodotus
    Travels with Herodotus
    Ryszard Kapuscinski
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 10, 2008
  • The Architecture of Happiness
    The Architecture of Happiness
    Alain De Botton
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 08, 2008
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 05, 2007
  • The Bluest Eye
    The Bluest Eye
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    May 08, 2007
  • The Road
    The Road
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 28, 2007
  • Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    W. H. Auden
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 13, 2007
  • No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 11, 2006
  • Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
    Giles Foden
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Last Night
    Last Night
    James Salter
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Never Let Me Go
    Never Let Me Go
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Kafka on the Shore
    Kafka on the Shore
    Haruki Murakami
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2006
  • The Plot Against America
    The Plot Against America
    Philip Roth
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 27, 2005
  • Too Brief a Treat
    Too Brief a Treat
    The Letters of Truman Capote
    Truman Capote
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2005
  • Status Anxiety
    Status Anxiety
    Alain De Botton
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 10, 2005
  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The City and the Pillar
    The City and the Pillar
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2003
  • The Razor's Edge
    The Razor's Edge
    W. Somerset Maugham
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 09, 2003
  • Julian
    Julian
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 12, 2003
  • You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    Alessandro Boffa
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 17, 2003
  • Selected Essays of John Berger
    Selected Essays of John Berger
    John Berger
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • The Shape of a Pocket
    The Shape of a Pocket
    John Berger
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • A New World Order
    A New World Order
    Essays
    Caryl Phillips
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 30, 2002
  • A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Novel
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • The Shadow of the Sun
    The Shadow of the Sun
    Ryszard Kapuscinski
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • A Fine Balance
    A Fine Balance
    Rohinton Mistry
    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 30, 2001
  • Quarrel & Quandary
    Quarrel & Quandary
    Essays
    Cynthia Ozick
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 13, 2001

Other Books by this Author

  • Recitatif
    Recitatif
    A Story
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 01, 2022
  • The Measure of Our Lives
    The Measure of Our Lives
    A Gathering of Wisdom
    Toni Morrison
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Dec 03, 2019
  • Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power
    Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power
    Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality
    Toni Morrison
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 1992
  • Recitatif
    Recitatif
    A Story
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 01, 2022
  • The Measure of Our Lives
    The Measure of Our Lives
    A Gathering of Wisdom
    Toni Morrison
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Dec 03, 2019
  • Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power
    Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power
    Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality
    Toni Morrison
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 1992
Related Articles
General Education & Professional Learning English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History High School Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Translanguaging Collections
April 19 2022

NEW! PRH Education Translanguaging Collections

Translanguaging is a communicative practice of bilinguals and multilinguals, that is, it is a practice whereby bilinguals and multilinguals use their entire linguistic repertoire to communicate and make meaning (García, 2009; García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017)   It is through that lens that we have partnered with teacher educators and bilingual education experts, Drs.

Read more

NEW! PRH Education Translanguaging Collections

General Education & Professional Learning English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History High School Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Translanguaging Collections
April 19 2022
General English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Environmental Science
October 22 2020

PRH Education Classroom Libraries

“Books are a students’ passport to entering and actively participating in a global society with the empathy, compassion, and knowledge it takes to become the problem solvers the world needs.” –Laura Robb   Research shows that reading and literacy directly impacts students’ academic success and personal growth. To help promote the importance of daily independent

Read more

PRH Education Classroom Libraries

General English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Environmental Science
October 22 2020
Connect with Us!

Get the latest news on all things Secondary Education. Learn about our books, authors, teacher events, and more!

Friend us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Subscribe on YouTube

View us on Pinterest

Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire.

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House

About Secondary Education

  • About Us
  • FAQ
  • Conferences
  • Contact your PreK-12 Representative
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads

Penguin Random House

  • PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • global.PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

About Secondary Education

  • About Us
  • FAQ
  • Conferences

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads
  • Contact your PreK-12 Representative
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House

  • PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • global.PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House
Back to Top

/