Edward P. Jones, author

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.

All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories
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ISBN: 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
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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
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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.