From the publication of his first novel, the literary reputation of Madison Percy Jones Jr. has been solid, not just in America but in South America and Europe as well. Among his earliest American admirers were such respected literary figures as Flannery O'Connor, Allen Tate, James Dickey, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle. M. E. Bradford compared Jones's third novel, A Buried Land (1963), favorably to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866); Hayden Carruth praised A Cry of Absence (1971) highly, and Monroe K. Spears placed that novel in the company of the best writings by Sophocles, Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. In recent years Jones's work has been the subject of many favorable reviews by such writers as Jesse Hill Ford and Madison Smartt Bell (who says he was named after Jones) and the subject of a growing number of scholarly articles, interviews, and reviews...