Synopses & Reviews
Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Cafe, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson ("I thought he just had good posture," said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott's rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind. Out of print for fifteen years, Joe Jones is a novel of hilarity and joy.
Review
"Lamott has written before about coping with death....But Joe Jones is about nothing else....Lamott's spare prose can sing, but here it too often sounds forced." Library Journal
Review
"Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration. [Her] real genius lies in capturing the ineffable, describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones...perfectly. She is nothing short of miraculous." The New Yorker
Synopsis
"If love is details, so is storytelling, and Anne Lamott excels at it. Her way with analogy, metaphor, and evocative detail is subtle; her ability to shift from the specific to the general to the specific again, superb."--The Nation
Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Cafe, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson, ("I thought he just had good posture," said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott's rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.
Synopsis
Joe Jones is Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Cafe, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Her rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.
Synopsis
Centered around a group of eccentric characters who congregate in Jessie's Cafe, this is a story of loss, recovery, and the humor that heals.
About the Author
Anne Lamott is the author of five critically praised novels: the national bestseller Crooked Little Heart (1997), All New People (1989), Joe Jones (1985), Rosie (1983), and Hard Laughter (1980). She has also written three bestselling works of nonfiction: Traveling Mercies (1999), a collection of autobiographical essays on faith; Bird by Bird (1994), a guide to writing and the challenges of a writer's life; and Operating Instructions (1993), an account of life as a single mother during her sons first year. Lamott's online column in Salon magazine was voted the Best of the Web by Newsweek. She lives in northern California.