Jazz

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession based on the hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.

"As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." -Glamour



In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse.

"Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious." -People "Wonderful. . . . A brilliant, daring novel. . . . Every voice amazes." -Chicago Tribune

"She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner." -Newsweek



"[A] masterpiece. . . . She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison." -Entertainment Weekly

"Thrillingly written . . . seductive. . . . Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel." -Chicago Sun-Times

"A compelling blend of heart and language. . . . Resounds with passion." -The Boston Globe

"Marvelous. . . . Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time." -Vogue

"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women." -Edna O'Brien, The New York Times Book Review

"She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation-that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite." -San Francisco Chronicle

"As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved. . . . Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." -Glamour

"She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart." -John Leonard, National Public Radio

"A masterpiece. . . . A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion. . . . Mesmerizing." -Cosmopolitan

"Lyrically brooding. . . . One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator's mind." -The New York Times

"Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious." -People

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."

The snow she ran through was so windswept she left no footprints in it, so for a time nobody knew exactly where on Lenox Avenue she lived. But, like me, they knew who she was, who she had to be, because they knew that her husband, Joe Trace, was the one who shot the girl. There was never anyone to prosecute him because nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead girl's aunt didn't want to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn't improve anything. Besides, she found out that the man who killed her niece cried all day and for him and for Violet that is as bad as jail.

Regardless of the grief V