Published: 4 January 2002
Imprint: Vintage
In the afterglow of triumph - her widely celebrated, Pultizer Prize-winning bestseller, Beloved - Toni Morrision moves to even higher ground. JAZZ is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profund love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style.
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one.At last, at last, everything's ahead.Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of a promise.Joe Trace, door -to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband, shoots to death his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen year old Dorcas. At the funeral his determined, hard-working wife Violet tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife.In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present and future, a mysterious voice weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend and reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.Jazz is an unprecedented and astonishing invention, a landmark on the American literary landscape - a novel unforgettable and for all time.
Pub date: 4 January 2002
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.
Also by Toni Morrison
The Blue Rose
Echo Burning
Junichiro Tanizaki
The Heart's Invisible Furies
Stone Country
Maybe the Horse Will Talk
Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition
The Tea Gardens