{"product_id":"the-source-of-selfregard-isbn-9780525521037","title":"The Source of Self-Regard","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER \u003c\/b\u003e• 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).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese 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 (\u003ci\u003eThe Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eParadise)\u003c\/i\u003e and that of others. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn essential collection from an essential writer, \u003ci\u003eThe Source of Self-Regard\u003c\/i\u003e shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.\u003ci\u003ePeril\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart I THE FOREIGNER’S HOME\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Dead of September 11 \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Foreigner’s Home \u003cbr\u003e Racism and Fascism \u003cbr\u003e Home \u003cbr\u003e Wartalk \u003cbr\u003e The War on Error \u003cbr\u003e A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed \u003cbr\u003e Moral Inhabitants \u003cbr\u003e The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care \u003cbr\u003e The Habit of Art \u003cbr\u003e The Individual Artist \u003cbr\u003e Arts Advocacy \u003cbr\u003e Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address \u003cbr\u003e The Slavebody and the Blackbody \u003cbr\u003e Harlem on My Mind: Contesting Memory—\u003cbr\u003e     Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration \u003cbr\u003e Women, Race, and Memory \u003cbr\u003e Literature and Public Life \u003cbr\u003e The Nobel Lecture in Literature \u003cbr\u003e Cinderella’s Stepsisters \u003cbr\u003e The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInterlude BLACK MATTER(S)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eTribute to Martin Luther King Jr. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Race Matters \u003cbr\u003e Black Matter(s)\u003cbr\u003e Unspeakable Things Unspoken: \u003cbr\u003e      The Afro-American Presence in American Literature \u003cbr\u003e Academic Whispers \u003cbr\u003e Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes \u003cbr\u003e Hard, True, and Lasting \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart II GOD’S LANGUAGE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eJames Baldwin Eulogy\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The Site of Memory \u003cbr\u003e God’s Language \u003cbr\u003e Grendel and His Mother \u003cbr\u003e The Writer Before the Page \u003cbr\u003e The Trouble with Paradise\u003cbr\u003e On \u003ci\u003eBeloved\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chinua Achebe \u003cbr\u003e Introduction of Peter Sellars \u003cbr\u003e Tribute to Romare Bearden \u003cbr\u003e Faulkner and Women \u003cbr\u003e The Source of Self-Regard \u003cbr\u003e Rememory \u003cbr\u003e Memory, Creation, and Fiction \u003cbr\u003e Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell \u003cbr\u003e Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eSources\u003c\/i\u003e“Close your eyes and make a wish. Wish that one of the most informed, smartest, most successful people in your profession walks into your living room, pulls up a chair and says, “This is what I’ve been thinking. …” That’s “The Source of Self-Regard… The bursts of rumination examine world history, skirt religion, scour philosophy, racism, anti-Semitism, femininity, war and folk tales…There’s even a tidbit or two about her closely guarded personal life. But the real magic is witnessing her mind and imagination at work… This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eJames McBride\u003ci\u003e, New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Source of Self-Regard\u003c\/i\u003e speaks to today's social and political moment as directly as this morning's headlines... Morrison tackles headfirst the weighty issues that have long troubled America's conscience... profoundly insightful.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—NPR\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Clearly we do not deserve Morrison, and clearly we need her badly...In this collection of nonfiction written over the past four decades, the revered (and sometimes controversial) author reinforces her status as a piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race... the book explodes into pure brilliance... [It is Morrison’s] definitive statement.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"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... Have there been many minds more intriguing, or writers more sublimely challenging? \u003ci\u003eThe Source of Self-Regard\u003c\/i\u003e excavates Morrison's vast well of knowledge. Open its pages and receive.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—O Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"In an era when complex ideas are reduced to slogans and tweets, when language is dumbed down and truth so often debased, \u003ci\u003eThe Source of Self-Regard\u003c\/i\u003e moves with courage and assurance in the opposite direction. What a gift.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Tampa Bay Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art... Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Morrison turns a critical eye on race, social politics, money, feminism, culture, and the press, with the essential mandate that each of us bears the responsibility for reaching beyond our superficial identities and circumstances for a closer look at what it means to be human.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Booklist \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e(starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Some superb pieces headline this rich collection...Prescient and highly relevant to the present political moment...\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eTONI 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.\u003cb\u003ePeril\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, call­ing into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppres­sion that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That is their peril.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ours is of another sort.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writ­ing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unha­rassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to cen­sor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I have been told that there are two human responses to the per­ception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure; incarceration in holding camps, prisons; or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct mean­ing in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is right that such protection be initiated by other writers. And it is impera­tive not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304647250149,"sku":"NP9780525521037","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525521037.jpg?v=1767741603","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-source-of-selfregard-isbn-9780525521037","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}