Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship
It basks in her ordinary humanity. With great respect and meticulous research, Williams reveals Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century ... Fans of literary gossip will find much to delight them in this book ... [Morrison] helped Black voices ring out loud and clear. She was anything but 'an object of veneration.' And as Dana A. Williams makes clear in this fine book, that makes her all the more priceless.
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Deeply researched and illuminating ... Meticulous and intimate ... The hard-driving editorial mission that had defined nearly two decades of Morrison’s life had never been peripheral for her—and hindsight reveals what a versatile catalyst she’d been in American literary culture.
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The specificity of Dana A. Williams’s Toni at Random takes it beyond the bounds of yet another biographical work about a world-renowned writer ... People must know and feel that they have the power of influence in order to wield it properly, and Morrison’s editorial career, as portrayed by Williams, seemed, with every decision made along the way, to be a call to action to Black readers, writers, researchers, and to the world that so frequently discounted them ... People must know and feel that they have the power of influence in order to wield it properly, and Morrison’s editorial career, as portrayed by Williams, seemed, with every decision made along the way, to be a call to action to Black readers, writers, researchers, and to the world that so frequently discounted them... People must know and feel that they have the power of influence in order to wield it properly, and Morrison’s editorial career, as portrayed by Williams, seemed, with every decision made along the way, to be a call to action to Black readers, writers, researchers, and to the world that so frequently discounted them ... Williams takes care to highlight how important it was to Morrison that her authors trusted her publishing expertise ... She never leans too far in one direction, always allowing Morrison’s expressed beliefs and opinions to lead her to a particular understanding. ... Williams does not discuss Morrison’s editorial credits linearly, sometimes jumping forwards or backwards in time. The reasons for this are not altogether clear, aside from wanting to link certain authors to others with regard to their literary genres, concerns, or cultural impact, but even those associations feel somewhat loose ... Toni at Random is an edifying look at a beloved creator’s work as not only a writer, but a champion of writers. What it reveals is not meant to overturn, but to sharpen the picture of Toni Morrison we carry in our minds. Ultimately, it confirms that she did indeed love what she, in all her words and works, professed to.
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