Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

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Writer Toni Morrison died in 2019, and something interesting has happened since. The tributes haven't slowed down, they've actually accelerated. Publishers have reissued her novels. I come across her quotes on social media almost every day. And there's a real conversation happening right now about her legacy, what it means, whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that it's actually getting in the way of the work itself.

My guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali Surpel, has been reading Morrison since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades. She's watched the critical conversation circle the same territory. Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status, while the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page hasn't really been examined. That gap is what has become her new book On Morrison, which moves through all eleven of her novels, from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, as well as Morrison's criticism, plays, and poetry. Namwali Surpel is a professor of English at Harvard University, and her own novels, The Old Drift and the Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalist for the National Book Critics Circle.

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