Description
'A literary giant, and one of my absolute favourite writers' TAYARI JONES, AUTHOR OF AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
'An American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in the blood' JOHN UPDIKE, NEW YORKER
'Eva's silence, and her status here as legally insane, are eloquent testimony to the condition of being a woman in this man's world' KIRKUS REVIEWS
Eva Medina Canada sits in her psychiatric ward, silent and unremorseful. She has murdered her lover and they want to know why. Her memories weave back and forth over encounters with the men in her life - the schoolboy who played doctors and nurses with a dirty popsicle stick; her mother's boyfriend; her cousin; her husband; a stranger on the bus. She's been propositioned and abused for as long as she can remember.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
An American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in the blood * New Yorker *
Corregidora was a small, fiercely concentrated story, harsh and perfectly told . . . Original, superbly imagined, nothing about the book was simple or easily digested. Out of the worn themes of miscegenation and diminishment, Gayl Jones excavated the disturbingly buried damage of racism. Eva's Man is a deepened exploration of the woman's inner life; of the pressures, the cruelties, the imposed expectations * New Republic *
Gayl Jones . . . accomplishes the almost impossible: a second novel that's every bit as intense, brutally honest and haunting as her first * Mademoiselle *
Jones's writing powerfully blends narrative and lyricism. Her people speak a spare, lean, Southern black language . . . Her imagination seems to thrive on outstripping one's expectations * Newsweek *
Gayl Jones's work remains essential and vital; I will be rereading her catalogue for the rest of my life * Nylon *
Gayl Jones is one furious, lacerating writer. You don't read her easily, and you can't forget her at all . . . Hyper-real and traumatic as this novel is, it's one that's been waiting to be written since Samuel Richardson gave us the male point of view of Clarissa, that other fallen woman whose only acceptable alternative to ravishment was death. Eva's silence, and her status here as legally insane, are eloquent testimony to the condition of being a woman in this man's world * Kirkus Reviews *
Book Information
ISBN 9780349012155
Author Gayl Jones
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Virago Press Ltd
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 180g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 126mm * 24mm