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.

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.