Gayl Jones’s Novels of Oppression - The New Yorker
A Critic at Large October 4, 2021 Issue Gayl Jones's Novels of Oppression In the author's work, colonization and racial hatred turn mother against child, Black against white, man against woman. By Hilton Als September 27, 2021 The real subject of her books is fracture: love begets violence at nearly every turn. Illustration by Xia Gordon Content In 1975, the professor and poet Michael S. Harper conducted a lengthy interview with Gayl Jones, a twenty-six-year-old writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Jones was a former graduate student of his in the literary-arts program at Brown University, and the occasion was the publication of her first book, "Corregidora," a short, baroque novel about love and history in Truman-era Kentucky. The novel had been edited by Toni Morrison, who was then working as a senior editor at Random House. (It was Harper who had first sent Jones's work to Morrison.) But Jones had attracted notice before she was accepted at Brown,