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Tar Baby

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison

By Toni Morrison
Read by Desiree Coleman

By Toni Morrison
Read by Desiree Coleman

By Toni Morrison
Read by Alfre Woodard

By Toni Morrison
Read by Alfre Woodard

Best Seller

Part of Vintage International

Paperback $16.00

Jun 08, 2004 | ISBN 9781400033447

Hardcover $30.00

Mar 12, 1981 | ISBN 9780394423296

Ebook $11.99

Jul 24, 2007 | ISBN 9780307388155

Audiobook Download $20.00

Jul 19, 2011 | 687 Minutes

Audiobook Download $12.95

Aug 05, 2003 | 371 Minutes

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    Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
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    • Hardcover $30.00

      Mar 12, 1981 | ISBN 9780394423296

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      Jul 24, 2007 | ISBN 9780307388155

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    About Tar Baby

    A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

    Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

    About Tar Baby

    A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

    Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

    About Tar Baby

    A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

    Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

    About Tar Baby

    A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

    Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

    About Tar Baby

    The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.

    The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years—the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife—who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them—a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant’s dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.

    Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian’s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret’s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him–he calls himself Son;  he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege.

    As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward—to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of  the separate worlds that have formed them—she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him—all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.

    Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.

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    Listen to a sample from Tar Baby

    Also in Vintage International

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    Mosquitoes

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    About Toni Morrison

    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.

    About Toni Morrison

    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.

    About Toni Morrison

    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.

    About Toni Morrison

    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.

    About Toni Morrison

    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.

    Product Details

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Paperback | $16.00
    Published by Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004 | 320 Pages | 5-3/16 x 8 | ISBN 9781400033447

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Hardcover | $30.00
    Published by Knopf
    Mar 12, 1981 | 320 Pages | 5-5/8 x 8-3/8 | ISBN 9780394423296

    Category: Literary Fiction

    Ebook | $11.99
    Published by Vintage
    Jul 24, 2007 | 320 Pages | ISBN 9780307388155

    Category: Literary Fiction | Audiobooks

    Audiobook Download | $20.00
    Published by Random House Audio
    Jul 19, 2011 | 687 Minutes | ISBN 9780307939876

    Category: Literary Fiction | Audiobooks

    Audiobook Download | $12.95
    Published by Random House Audio
    Aug 05, 2003 | 371 Minutes | ISBN 9780739302729
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    Praise

    “Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel.” —John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

    “Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability.” —New York

    “Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison’s story.” —The Washington Post

    “Wrenchingly good. A terrific book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

    “Hypnotic, stunningly alive.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

    “That rare commodity, a truly public novel. . . . Morrison’s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates.” —Newsweek

    “Powerful. . . . A stunning performance. . . . Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.” —Kansas City Star

    “It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships.” —Vogue

    “Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking.” —St. Louis Globe-Democrat

    “Reminds us again that Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.” —Louisville Courier-Journal

    “Tar Baby is stupendous. Morrison is a writer of amazing skill.” —Roanoke Times & World

    “Its scope is grand and the interplay complex. But Morrison has the control of a skilled choreographer, with a careful eye pinned on pacing, suspense, grace, and frenzy. . . . She has an awesome lyric flair.” —The Charlotte Observer

    Awards

    Nobel Prize WINNER 1993

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