Gayl Jones published her first novel, Corregidora, in 1975, which was hailed by writers like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Updike—then she disappeared from the literary scene. Now she is releasing her first novel in 20 years, and at the Atlantic, Calvin Baker, takes a closer look at her fractured career. “The tentacles of slavery in the present day have grown into a principal concern of Black literature, and Jones’s early work was absorbed into this canon almost imperceptibly,” Baker writes. “Over time, her literary ambitions would evolve, as she published and then receded from the public eye, published and then receded. This spring, she self-published her first novel in 21 years—Palmares, a six-volume work about the last fugitive-slave settlement in Brazil. In mid-June, Beacon Press bought the rights to the book, with plans to release it in September 2021. In the sprawling narrative, set in the 17th century, Jones’s feats of linguistic and historical invention are on ample display.”
The Long-Awaited Return of Gayl Jones
If A Boy Could Dream
“I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer.” Ocean Vuong on immigrating into English and the first poem he ever wrote.
The End of the Beat Generation
The “grande dame of the Beat Generation” has died at age 90. Carolyn Cassady passed away last Friday near her home in England. She was the inspiration for Camille, Dean Moriarty’s overburdened second wife in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Yet Cassady was a writer in her own right and published two books, Off the Road and Heart Beat: My Life With Jack and Neal, about how the Beat Generation was misunderstood.
Lahiri on Salter
As part of a Paris Review series of essays celebrating James Salter, Jhumpa Lahiri writes “For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years.”
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This is Your Brain on Austen
What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
New Old Advice for Writers
“The internet teems with writerly advice, almost all of which suggests that creativity is served best by monasticism, a quiet life filled with pencils—but that kind of advice seems to take a very short view of history, overlooking the one classic way to rouse the capricious Muses: sexually transmitted disease.” According to The Hairpin, maybe it’s not an MFA you need, just syphilis. After all, it seems to have worked for James Joyce, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Oscar Wilde and many, many others.
“You are saying you do not exist in the American dream except as a nightmare.”
Make some time this weekend to read James Baldwin and Audre Lorde in conversation, which originally appeared in a 1984 issue of Essence, but has since been reposted by the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.
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