“Lord, in this time of national upheaval and historical erasure, I’m sorely missing Toni Morrison,” writes Honorée Fanonne Jeffers in her introduction to the new reissue of Morrison’s Beloved. “I have her words, but I’m missing her physical presence, the seemingly effortless wisdom she provided us.”

Indeed. All you have to do is watch one of the many clips of the Nobel laureate on YouTube—take her 1998 conversation with Charlie Rose, for example—to see, to feel, what Jeffers is talking about. In that clip, Morrison patiently schools Rose, the whisper of a smile on her lips, as she responds to a question about the role of race in her novels. There are many other such clips, all worth watching for a sense of the woman herself, although her effortless wisdom rarely shrinks down to sound-bite size. For a taste of her brilliance in its undiluted form, check out the recently published Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon, which collects her lectures (and other teaching materials) on American literature at Princeton. “Deeply insightful investigations of major works,” says our reviewer.

One of the highlights of my professional life was the opportunity to sit in the audience in March 2015 as Morrison accepted the Ivan Sandrof Award for lifetime achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, on whose board I sat at the time. She recalled the importance of critics to her own work—the NBCC’s John Leonard was an early champion of her first novel, The Bluest Eye—praising this “wild faculty…that works to confront, alter and expand the possibilities of publishing.”

She was not always so generous with critics. It’s tempting (but impossible) to imagine what the author, who died in 2019, would make of On Morrison, the new book by novelist and scholar Namwali Serpell, who appears on the cover of our March 1 issue. Serpell, 45, has been reading Morrison’s books since youth, grappling with their meaning and now including them in her syllabi at Harvard University, where she’s a professor of English. “Morrison has shaped my thinking on everything from literature to politics to criticism to ethics to the responsibilities of making art,” she writes. “But the facts remain: She is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach.” The long first section of the book, in which Serpell explores Morrison’s oeuvre book by book, is titled “On Difficulty.” Don’t miss our interview with Serpell, herself the author of two acclaimed novels, The Old Drift and The Furrows.

We may not have the woman herself, but we do indeed have her words. All of Morrison’s novels are currently being reissued by Vintage, with spare and striking new covers designed by Perry De La Vega and new introductions by Jeffers, Jesmyn Ward (Sula), Jacqueline Woodson (The Bluest Eye), Tayari Jones (Song of Solomon), Kevin Young (Jazz), Raven Leilani (Love), Sasha Bonet (Tar Baby), Tommy Orange (Paradise), and Imani Perry (A Mercy). “Reissuing all these novels in these beautiful new designs is an event: It has been 20 years since they had a new look,” says executive editor John Freeman, who’s overseeing the program. “Introduced by novelists and writers whose work she made possible, it also feels like just the right time to read, discuss and appreciate the work anew, to make a whole new generation readier to read these great books. Readier to live in the America she called home.” 

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.