Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club)

From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.

One of the most celebrated writers of our time, Toni Morrison has become a distinctive literary voice in the 20th Century, and her works have become essential reading in the body of contemporary American fiction.

Toni Morrison was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the Spring of 1989.

Ms. Morrison has degrees from Howard and Cornell Universities. Among the universities where she has held teaching posts are Yale, Bard College and Rutgers. The New York State Board of Regents appointed her to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany in 1984, a post she held until 1989. In 1988 she was the Obert C. Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University. In 1990 she delivered the Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University.

Her six major novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz, have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer prize for Beloved. Both novels were chosen as the main selections for the Book-of-the-Month Club, in 1977 and 1987 respectively. Her books of essays include Playing in the Dark, and her edited collection Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Forthcoming from Pantheon Books in early 1997 is another edited collection, Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, edited with Claudia Brodsky Lacour.

Her first play, Dreaming Emmett, was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York (1985). Meeting with favorable reviews, it drew audiences throughout New York and the entire Tri-State area.

Honey and Rue, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Kathleen Battle, with lyrics by Toni Morrison and music by Andre Previn, premiered in January 1992.

Ms. Morrison has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, Brown, the University of Michigan, and Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot. She was also the first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987 and was New York State Governor's Arts Awardee in 1986.

Other prestigious awards include: the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in Literature, 1989; Sara Lee Corporation Front Runner Award in Arts, 1989; Anisfield Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988; the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 1978; and the Distinguished Writer Award of 1978 from the American Academy of Art and Letters.

She was a senior editor at Random House for twenty years.

Toni Morrison is a founding member of the Academie Universelle Des Cultures (at the Louvre, Paris), a Trustee of the New York Public Library, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the Author's Guild where she served on the Guild Council and as Foundation Treasurer. She served on the National Council of The Arts for six years and is a member of the Africa Watch and Helsinki Watch Committees on Human Rights.

In 1993 Ms. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.