Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina,...

In this 1983 short story about race and the relationships that shape us through life, Twyla and Roberta, friends since childhood who are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem as they grow older, cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. After losing touch, they meet several times by accident. Seemingly...

This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines -- from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. The one, Nel Wright, chooses to stay in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. The other, Sula Peace, rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college,...

On a tropical island paradise, six people interact with each other in all the tender or hateful ways that human beings are capable of. Rich and poor, black and white, young and old, male and female, each has something to teach the others -- and each has something to learn.

Jamey Tortoise is smarter than anyone else and Jimi Hare is faster, but when a race is announced each consults a reporter about how to get what he really wants when and if he should win in this updated twist on the familiar fable.

Little Cloud does not want to join the other clouds in terrorizing the earth with storms, but grows lonely and longs to look closer at mountains and seas, until Lady Wind makes her dream come true.

Lula Ann ist solch ein tiefschwarzes Baby, dass ihre Mutter bei der Geburt fast zu Tode erschrickt und der Vater die junge Familie verlässt, weil er das Kind nicht als seines anerkennen kann. Die Mutter zieht Lula Ann allein groß und lehrt sie Gehorsam und Unterwürfigkeit, um nur nicht aufzufallen. Doch die heranwachsende Tochter sträubt sich gegen die verordnete Angepasstheit. Sie ändert ihren Namen in Bride, kleidet sich in provokant strahlendes...

Who IS the foreigner? Am I the foreigner in my own home? Who decides? Such were the questions posed by renowned author Toni Morrison at her 2006 guest-curated exhibit at the Louvre, "The Foreigner's Home". There she invited several renowned artists whose work also dealt with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public discussion that Morrison herself had been pursuing through her own research and writing. This film...