"Like a number of other black women writers, I have made it a point to speak of our 'tradition,' yet I know that no such tradition is assumed by the rest of the world, primarily because our books have not been read or taught"

The coming age of the post-nationalist black aesthetic.

“Morrison is one of the great, serious writers we have. Who else tries to do what Dickens did: create wild, flamboyant, abstractly symbolic characters who are at the same time not grotesques but sweetly alive, full of deep feeling?”

Morrison’s New York embodies the spirit of jazz. Free, but frightening in its freedom, it’s a place where the night sky “can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless.”