Kim Dingle 'Black Girl Dragging White Girl' (1992) oil and charcoal on canvas, 72 in. × 60 in. Publishing Recitatif in book form elevates it from anthology entry to its own masterpiece, like a small ...

“Recitatif,” Toni Morrison’s rare short story re-released as a stand-alone book on Feb. 1, is a brief and brilliant literary experiment. The story of the book is short and simple: two girls, Twyla ...

I’m at a bit of a loss over how to write about Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.” The only short story ever written by the late Nobel laureate, who would have turned 91 this week, “Recitatif” was originally ...

Toni Morrison spoke often about the incoherence of race. “When you know somebody’s race, what do you know? Virtually nothing,” Morrison mused in one such instance during a “60 Minutes” interview in ...

It’s a term I invented, while watching the late, great Toni Morrison masterfully take down her critics: “The Morrisonian Moment.” My favorite of these instances took place during a 1998 interview with ...

I first became acquainted with the work of Toni Morrison in college. Two of her books were required readings in my Honors program, “Sula” and “Beloved.” When her short story “Recitatif” came across my ...

Two little girls meet in a children’s shelter sometime in the 1950s. They spend four months as roommates there and then meet again randomly as they grow up. One girl is Black, the other is white, but ...