Novelist Gayl Jones is a fiction nominee for the National Book Award, the rare established name on a list of 10 that features eight debut works of fiction.
Jones was cited Friday for “The Birdcatcher,” an exploration of race, art and marriage in which a Black American writer journeys to the island of Ibiza and stays with her married friends, one of whom is trying to kill the other. Jones, 72, is herself the author of one of the most acclaimed debut books in recent memory, the novel “Corregidora,” which came out in 1975. She has published sporadically in the decades following and last year broke a 20-year hiatus with the novel “Palmares," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
