Maxima Library

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 nation's capital that serves as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones's prizewinning collection, Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic monuments and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that world into the lives of African American men and women who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense of hope. 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, the characters in these stories forge bonds of community as they struggle against the limits of their city to stave off the loss of family, friends, memories, and, ultimately, themselves.

Critically acclaimed upon publication, Lost in the City introduced Jones as an undeniable talent, a writer whose unaffected style is not only evocative and forceful but also filled with insight and poignancy.

Amazon.com Review

Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

From Publishers Weekly

In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children; Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing.

Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives!

I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).

If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction, but it's still absolutely kicking poetry's ass on all fronts, and, like poetry, remains in general more adventurous, fluid, and vitally modern than its novelistic big brother.

To review these stories in terms of their quality seems redundant – that they're terrific is a no-brainer. Entering its eighty-fifth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories consistently collects – I won't say the finest short fiction, but it collects inarguably exquisite short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. We'll concede that there may be better stories out there, simmering under the radar or even (gasp!) unpublished, which does nothing to detract from the eminence of the ones collected here. This is a damn good read.

This year's edition was edited and introduced by Laura Furman, with a jury consisting of celebrated writers Cristina Garcia, Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It's dedicated to Chekov upon the centenary of his death, which is forgivably predictable, given his pervasive influence on the short form. Besides illuminating notes from the writers on their work, the 2005 edition contains an essay by each of the judges on their favorite story, and a glossary of literary journals big and small that will be a valuable resource for writers and readers alike.

If quality is a given, it seems the best utility a review of the The O. Henry Prize Stories can have is to pick out the affinities between them and see (a) what writers were compelled to write about in the past year, (b) what editors were compelled to publish, and (c) which literary organs are currently in vogue. Word to the wise: If you'd like to win an O. Henry Prize, relentlessly submit to the New Yorker, which originally published no less than six of the twenty stories here, comfortably vanquishing silver-medallists The Kenyon Review and Zoetrope, who clock in with an admirable (if measly by comparison) two stories apiece.

No less than four stories in the volume revolve around music, all of which are deeply appreciative, none entirely trusting. Michael Palmer's atmospheric tale, "The Golden Era of Heartbreak", is haunted by a lovelorn trucker's song that carries everywhere in a town flattened by the departure of the narrator's wife. "My house filled to the eaves with this song," he states in his spare, lyrical tone, and the story is filled with it as well: The prose, like the town, is "flat as an envelope," and the trucker's song stretches spectrally across it.

A personal favorite of mine, Ben Fountain's "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers", is an elliptical, richly detailed character sketch in the vein of Millhauser or Hemon, about the intertwined destinies of two eleven-fingered pianists in nineteenth century Vienna, steeped in all the paranoia, political and ethnic tensions, and obsolete superstitions of the day.

In Timothy Crouse's "Sphinxes", a remarkably confident and unclassifiable tale, piano lessons, love affairs and subtle emotional maneuvering are braided together with increasing complexity until they become indistinguishable. In each of these stories, music is salvation and undoing, pure force and calculated metaphor: a paradox, a chimera, a sphinx.

And Gail Jones's "Desolation" is about a primal, alienating sexual encounter at a Death in Vegas concert, although it cross-references with the second type of story that heavily informs this year's volume, the community / exile story, which we're coming to just now.

Many stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 revolve around issues of community, but not the traditional, fixed community – these stories are about the provisional communities that arise in times of crisis, and the communities forged by travelers, strangers, souls in spiritual and physical exile.

Judge favorite "Mudlavia", a coming of age tale by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, finds a young boy and his mother in a health resort filled with questionable, exciting characters of colorful mien and shady provenance – slowly, away from their domineering father and husband, we watch them come alive to their own desires, desires that this alien context was necessary to draw out.

Another judge favorite, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's period piece "Exile in London", evokes the faded aura of postwar London by way of the young narrator's recollections of the ragged diaspora in her aunt's boarding house. And Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor" details the tensions, both sexual and cultural, between a prototypically American teenager in Bombay and her native Indian tutor.

But the finest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 has to be Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which describes the plight of a homeless, admittedly "crazy" Spokane Native American as he embarks on a day-long quest to raise one-thousand dollars to buy back his Grandmother's tribal regalia from a pawn shop. That the story's themes are large and poignant is obvious; what's remarkable is that it manages funny, hopeful, angry, and redemptive at once. The narrator's refusal to lapse into self-pity or misanthropy at his pathetic plight is counterintuitive yet rings true, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion, not-at-all inevitable and uncommonly generous of spirit, one feels every inch of his joy.

In the end, this is the short-story function that trumps all the others: The ability to vault the reader into realms of unanticipated joy. While not all the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 achieve this as viscerally as Alexie's fable, each one loudly debunks any nonsense about the short story's obsolescence.