Two epic American stories

The Prophets, Robert Jones (Putnam): This debut novel is already having a profound i mpact , wi t h Jones’s writing here being compared t o To n i Morr i s o n and James Baldwin, putting him firmly in an exalted group of iconic Bl a c k wr i t e r s. “The Prophets” is about the relationship between two Black men enslaved on a plantation in the Deep South. It began, Jones says in a letter to readers, when he asked the question of whether Black queer people existed in the distant past.

They did, but they weren’t much mentioned — he found little to go on despite deep research. And when queerness was mentioned, it was rarely and briefly, or as something “despicable.”

Which, he writes, caused him to ask: “What about love?” In the end, he says in that same letter to readers, “Love is also why I wrote this book: for the ancestors who were wiped from the record, who spoke to me when I almost didn’t listen. To give me a line to walk back to and a tree to lean against and shake when the mood strikes.”

So this book is not just about the relationship between Samuel and Isaiah; it’s about slavery, it’s about relationships, about that entire period in the Antebellum South. Read that letter; it’s on a website created for “The Prophets,” theprophetsportal.com. Jones’s voice is so compelling, that alone will make you want to read the book. And then, once you pick it up, you’ll be drawn in by the voices on the page.

Nick, Michael Farris Smith (Little, Brown): “The

Great Gatsby ” enters the public d o mai n this year, along with other books including Virginia

Woolf ’s “Mrs.

Dalloway.” This means other authors can write their own spins on such books, or publishers can bring out new editions without having to pay any fees. “Nick” is the first such book; it imagines the back story of Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway, before he moved to West Egg.