Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Edward P. Jones takes his time and gets spectacular results....Since his first collection...Jones has opened up his stories. They're longer and richer, and occasional touches of magic realism creep into their typically calm and elegant accumulation of details." Oregonian
Review
"[All Aunt Hagar's Children] brings together more than a dozen of [Jones's] stories...Individually, they show off the art of a writer with unusual talent and an often-eccentric approach to his material." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Like William Trevor and Alice Munro, Jones compresses whole novels into these stories....In this powerful and bleak book, the dead serve one other function: They remind us our lease is not always renewed." Boston Globe
Review
"The writers he calls to mind are Eudora Welty and Alice Munro at their most venturesome, stretching what a story can do, yet always staying true to the spirit of place." Seattle Times
Review
"Each of the stories reads like a novel, jumping around in time, introducing us to myriad characters with unyielding histories." Los Angeles Times
Review
"The fourteen stories...traverse the length of the 20th century as it was experienced in black neighborhoods in and around Washington....It's a work of the highest art." Baltimore Sun
Review
"These are long and rigorously developed stories that have a craftsman quality about them....It is nostalgia full of both pain and wonder, nostalgia very much worth visiting." San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
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 Worldshows 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 Childrenturns 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.
About the Author
Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. His second collection, All Aunt Hagars Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has been an instructor of fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.