Butter
Novellas, Stories, and Fragments
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- ¥2,400
発行者による作品情報
A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares
“Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.”
—Imani Perry, author of, Looking for Lorraine and Breathe
Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyper-realist to the mystical, in intricate multi-part stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.
Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas, about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jones follows her Pulitzer shortlisted The Birdcatcher with a collection of glorious stories and rough fragments. The long title story follows Odelle, a photographer and mixed-race daughter of the vaunted British war photographer Remunda Eadweard as she prepares to photograph Remunda, who was absent for much of her childhood. In "Sophia," the eponymous married narrator leaves the U.S. for some "elbow room" in Spain, where she recalls her youth among leftist revolutionaries in Mexico ("When I was with them, I suppose, for the first time I felt like a real person"). In Spain, a man follows her, and Jones coyly suggests he might be a private investigator hired by Sophia's husband. There is wit and more hints of intrigue in "A Spy Story," a brief sketch of an encounter between two Black women at a Connecticut farmhouse, one of whom is rumored to have been a spy during the Algerian War. When the narrator, a safety consultant for playgrounds, says, "People are always surprised I'm Black," the rumored former spy responds, "Welcome to the club." Among the 11 fragments, "Cultural Pluralism" sticks out for Jones's sympathetic if clunky attempt to give voice to a young Vietnamese woman whose Black American father brings her to the U.S. in the 1980s. For the most part, though, these stories sing. This is a gift for Jones's fans.
