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 Jones
shows her mastery of both dialogue and interiority.
There is a bare minimum of scene-setting and little
indication of actions such as standing, sitting or
leaving a room. Instead we find encounter after
encounter with richly individuated characters, each
sporting his or her own verbal idiosyncrasies, as
noted by a well-read travelling man with an acute ear
for 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.

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