We're proud that Toni Morrison has chosen Harvard Book Store as a stop on her limited-engagement tour to promote her new book, Paradise. She will be appearing on Wednesday, March 4, at 8:00 p.m., at Faneuil Hall in Boston. Please read our important information about obtaining your free tickets and signed bookplates for this event. Presented in association with the DuBois Institute and the Afro-American Studies Dept. of Harvard University.

About Toni Morrison:

Her third novel, Song of Solomon, about an African American man searching for his identity, won both the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977. Her fifth novel, Beloved, about a former slave woman coming to grips with the ghosts of her past, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

In addition to being Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison continues to serve as an editor at Random House, where she was working when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1969. She has edited such volumes as Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power and The Dancing Mind. Morrison is a member of the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

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About Paradise:

In Paradise -- her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature -- Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There ... where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.

What Critics Are Saying:

"Paradise is Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and it is possibly her best work of fiction to date." -- The New York Times Book Review

"... a breathtaking, risk-taking major work that will have readers feverishly, and fearfully turning the pages." -- Kirkus Reviews

"It is a fascinating story, wonderfully detailed by Morrison's shrewd and vivid portraits of Ruby's citizens and forebears. But the author has done more than that. Her town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate -- always personified and always searching -- about black identity and destiny in America's past and present." -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

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Bookplates
Bookplates signed by Toni Morrison will be given out at the event for Paradise only, and only to people who purchased the book at Harvard Book Store. You will be asked to show your receipt for Paradise. You need not bring the book with you, only the receipt.

If you have already purchased the book and have not kept your receipt, please call the store at 1-800-542-READ (7323) for instructions. Toni Morrison will not be signing books at the event, although you will be able to meet her in a receiving line afterwards.

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