From Library Journal
As Academy Award-nominated director John Singleton said of the violence in his film Boyz N the Hood , "It's what's goin' down in America." Jones addresses similar sociological realities in his collection of 14 short stories, writing affectingly of African American life in our nation's capital. This is not the Washington of monuments, tourists, and the federal government; rather, it is the darker side of the city. Jones describes the harsh realities of life that exist for some African Americans in our society: a young aspiring singer shot dead by her boyfriend (the father of her child), a young man thieving to earn a living, a daughter desperately searching for the "why" in her mother's stabbing death. Although these experiences will be unfamiliar to many readers, Jones instills humanity in his characters and stories. He depicts people struggling to overcome adversity and survive in a dangerous world. For popular collections.
- Kimberly G. Allen, National Assn. of Home Builders Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
At once folksy and urbane, this debut collection of stories pulses with the lifeblood of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., where Jones's black people are less the victims of society than of fate and chance. What unites the multihued African-Americans here is their sense of loss, whether it's of a family member taken in casual violence, or of one's soul, lost to drugs or ambition. A parentless teenager in ``The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,'' a girl full of confidence and spunk, finds her world shattered by her best friend's senseless death. Similarly, a middle-class man, leading ``a civilized life'' in the city, is devastated when his 15-year- old daughter runs away from home, never to return (``A New Man''). A motherless girl fills the void in her life with pigeons, until they too die or abandon the dying neighborhood (``The Girl Who Raised Pigeons''). Jones's unsparing view encompasses the hustler of ``Young Lions,'' a petty crook who enlists his loving girlfriend in a cruel scam; the middle-aged mother in ``His Mother's House,'' who ignores the source of her drug-dealing son's beneficence; and the high-powered lawyer in the title piece, who anesthetizes herself from her past with cocaine and passionless sex. But there's struggle, uplift, and survival in adversity here as well. In ``The Store,'' an unambitious young man grumbles through menial jobs, until he ends up attending Georgetown, in spite of himself. A dignified divorced woman keeps her family together in ``An Orange Line Train to Ballston.'' And a grown-up brother and sister cope differently with their father, who has spent most of their lives in jail for murdering their mother (``The Sunday Following Mother's Day''). Jones unerringly captures the quiet stateliness of elderly women in a trio of stories, culminating in ``Marie,'' which is his most self-reflexive piece. A skillful, elegiac collection, with remarkably little sociology. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“Poignant…Gripping…[Jones] has a careful ear for dialogue.”
From the Back Cover
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.
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 Hagar’s 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.
