Morrison’s only published short story, Recitatif (Knopf) was first published in 1983 and follows the lives of two women, Twyla and Roberta, who meet in an orphanage as children and differ in just one key way: one is black and one is white. Removing all racially coded language from the text and forcing a confrontation of one’s ingrained stereotypes and biases, Morrison offers Recitatif as an unsolvable challenge to the reader.
