PW: Yes, It's Beacon Press's First Novel

Steve Sherman |

Dec 08, 1997

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Yes, It's Beacon Press's First Novel
Steve Sherman -- 12/8/97
The 143-year-old house acquires work from reclusive African American writer Gayl Jones
After searching back files and "asking everyone in the organization who's still alive to talk about it," editorial director Helene Atwan is positioning a February 1998 release, The Healing by Gayl Jones, as the first novel (other than a reprint) that Beacon Press has published in its 143-year history.

The work, a backwards-told tale about an African American faith healer traveling in the South, is also the first novel by Jones available in the U.S. since her critically acclaimed first and second novels, Corregidora and Eva's Man, were published by Random House in the mid-1970s.

In fact, it was Jones's request to take back rights to those two earlier novels -- (Beacon now holds those rights and sells thousands of copies to bookstore accounts and through course adoptions annually) that led to the new acquisition. As part of Atwan's revamp of Beacon's Black Women Writers series -- she renamed it Blue Streak and plans to include women of all colors -- she thought to include Corregidora in the series. But Jones felt that she didn't want this and Eva's Man to be the only representation of her work.

"That's when I asked her to send me some new work," Atwan said. In response, the tech-savvy Jones gave Atwan a code to download the text of The Healing from a restricted website. "When she did I was completely stunned by it," Atwan said.

The solitary but certainly not electronically taciturn Jones told PW -- in an e-mail interview -- that "I'm no more interested now than I ever was in giving interviews. I gave a few interviews when my first books were published. There were numerous opportunities to become a 'celebrity writer.' It wasn't just my shyness that prevented it, because I was not shy at giving readings. I thought then and now that the emphasis should be on the books themselves."

In the late '70s, after following up her two novels with a collection of stories, White Rat, for Random House, Jones for a time exiled herself to France, although she is back in the country now, and has hardly suffered writer's block. She published a novel in Germany (written in English but translated directly into German) and some p try with African American Lotus Press in Detroit. Beacon will reprint both Jones's book-length p m, Song for Anninbo, which was originally published by Lotus, and a never-before-published novel, Mosquito, in 1999. Publication of the German novel in English is a possibility for the future.

Atwan maintains that for high-quality fiction, the first line of promotion for serious readers is reviews, "which won't be affected by the fact that Gayl's not out on the road. We have to respect the way she wants to work. When I started in publishing, fiction writers didn't go on the road. You don't have to be a public figure in order to be read and taken seriously."

The Healing also closes a circle for Atwan, who was working in publicity at Random House when then editor Toni Morrison first published Jones's work.The print run for The Healing hasn't been decided yet, Atwan said, adding that Beacon is planning to tap the network of readers who supported Jones in the '70s to help get the word out "that Gayl has come back."
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A version of this article appeared in the 12/08/1997 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: