All Aunt Hagar's Children - by Edward P Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction returns with a collection of 14 short stories.

From the Back Cover

Three years after the publication of his much-heralded, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World, Edward P. Jones returned with an elegiac, luminous masterpiece, All Aunt Hagar's Children. In these fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, Jones resurrects the minor characters in his first award-winning story collection, Lost in the City. The result is vintage Jones: powerful, magisterial tales that showcase his ability to probe the complexities and tenaciousness of the human spirit.

All Aunt Hagar's Children is filled with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is the city's ordinary citizens, not its power brokers, who most concern Jones. Here, everyday people who thought the values of the South would sustain them in the North find "that the cohesion born and nurtured in the south would be but memory in less than two generations."

Review Quotes

"Stunning. . .Jones forges powerful stories of lost causes and bone-deep endurance. So powerful and so beautiful." - O: the Oprah magazine
"Jones's . . .views demand our compassion: he is always asking us to see and therefore feel, more. . . .[His] imagination fills these long stories with people and incident and moments of great tenderness, not to say humor amidst the melancholy." - Harper's
"Edward P. Jones belongs in the first rank of American letters. . . . Jones has established himself as one of the most important writers of his own generation. The stories of All Aunt Hagar's Children, like all his previous work, radiate decency, humanity and an abiding faith in human possibility." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
"Powerful...Like William Trevor and Alice Munro, Jones compresses whole novels into these stories." - Boston Globe
"Individually, [the stories] show off the art of a writer with unusual talent. . .among these are. . .the best short fiction of the decade." - Chicago Tribune
"Manages to stun on every page; there are too many breathtaking lines to count." - Dave Eggers-New York Times Book Review
"Profound and resonant. . .Jones 's evocation of the distant past and the uncomfortable present is remarkable because of the humanity that illuminates each story and binds the reader to his characters." - Los Angeles Times Book Review