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.
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.
Thanks to a new book from Dana A. Williams, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, I have a new appreciation not just for Toni Morrison the writer and editor, but for the work of writing and editing in general ...
Williams, a professor of African American literature and graduate school dean at Howard University, has crafted a book that manages to satisfy as narrative, literary analysis and cultural criticism, offering multiple points of entry for different readers in search of different things. The acknowledgements reveal that the book is 20 years or more in the making and it shows in a book written with great knowledge, deep feeling and a sense of purpose. In this way, Williams mimics the work of her subject ... Williams shows how savvy and even calculating Morrison was as she positioned these books for the best chance of success in the marketplace, pursuing blurbs from luminaries like James Baldwin, and horse-trading for pre-publication publicity and review attention. Her attention to detail extended even to a book’s interior design ... Williams ingeniously structures the book around different threads of Morrison’s editorial work, non-fiction, fiction, a whole chapter on Ali, another on Davis, and others. The chronology weaves back and forth, but we’re never lost.
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.
Williams offers a distinct, in-depth, and essential focus on Morrison’s legacy as an editor, combining a scholarly approach based on detailed research with an accessibility that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Striking ... Vividly conveys Morrison’s commitment to preserving authenticity in her publishing work, and it also portrays a specific historical moment in the publishing industry and the benefits of a close editor-author relationship.
