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Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Known World
Troy
Johnson (AALBC.com), Edward P. Jones,
Dwight Fryer
(Author), Kwame
Alexander (Author+)
Edward P. Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C.
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant,
Jones was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His
first book, Lost in the City was originally published by William Morrow
in 1992 and shortlisted for the National Book Award. Mr. Jones was named a
National Book Award finalist for a second time with the publication of his debut
novel The Known World (Amistad 2003). He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
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 All
Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories
Click to order via
AmazonISBN: 0060557567
Pub. Date: August 29, 2006
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five
of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling
and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Known
World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer
than ever
Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book,
Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with
people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's
power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary
citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to
the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the
South and the temptations that await them further north, people
who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and
morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting
up with the chickens or people with centuries of education
behind them.
In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person
rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran
investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny
seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern
childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly
married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to
pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and
disappointed.
With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the
future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt
readers for years to come.
 The
Known World
Click to order via
Amazon
by Edward P. Jones
ISBN: 0060557540
Format: Hardcover, 389pp
Pub. Date: July 2003
Publisher: HarperCollins
Read an AALBC.com Book
Review
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and
former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual
mentor — William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in
antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's
tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation — as
well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia,
succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at
their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of
night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight
of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend
estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers
stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into
slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families
against slaves who have served them for years.
An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly
between the past and future and back again to the present, The
Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved
blacks, whites, and Indians — and allows all of us a deeper
understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by
the institution of slavery.
 Lost
in the City
Amazon
ISBN: 006079528X
Pub. Date: November 2004
Format: Paperback, 268pp
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
The nation's capital that serves
as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones's collection,
Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic Monuments
and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that
narrow world into the lives of African-American men and women
who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense
of continuity in their lives and connection to their community.
From "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" to the well-to-do career
woman awakened in the night by a phone call that will take her
on a journey back to the past, Jones paints portraits of people
who are only briefly sketched in daily newspaper articles.
Written with a generosity of detail, each story seems in itself
to be a short novel in which the characters struggle against the
limits of their city to put off the loss of family, friends,
memories, and, ultimately, themselves. With Lost in the City,
his first book, Edward Jones shows that he is a serious new
talent, one whose unaffected style is not only evocative and
forceful, but filled with insight and poignancy. His debut is a
welcome event in American writing.
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