The Unicorn Woman

Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable; from a historical standpoint, she stands at the very cutting edge of understanding the modern world, and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour, and incisiveness, is unmatched. Jones is a writer’s writer, and her influence is found everywhere – Imani Perry

Through Buddy’s picaresque journey, Gayl Jonesshows her mastery of both dialogue and interiority.There is a bare minimum of scene-setting and littleindication of actions such as standing, sitting orleaving a room. Instead we find encounter afterencounter with richly individuated characters, eachsporting his or her own verbal idiosyncrasies, asnoted by a well-read travelling man with an acute earfor speech patterns, just like his creator.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University and has taught at Wellesley and the University of Michigan. Her books include Corregidora (1975), Eva’s Man (1976), The Healing (1998), which was a National Book Award finalist, Palmares (2021), which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and The Birdcatcher (2022), which was also a National Book Award Finalist.