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Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones
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“Original and arresting….[Jones’s] stories will touch chords of empathy and recognition in all readers.”
—Washington Post
“These 14 stories of African-American life…affirm humanity as only good literature can.”
—Los Angeles Times
A magnificent collection of short fiction focusing on the lives of African-American men and women in Washington, D.C., Lost in the City is the book that first brought author Edward P. Jones to national attention. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honors for his novel The Known World, Jones made his literary debut with these powerful tales of ordinary people who live in the shadows in this metropolis of great monuments and rich history. Lost in the City received the Pen/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction and was a National Book Award Finalist. This beautiful 20th Anniversary Edition features a new introduction by the author, and is a wonderful companion piece to Jones’s masterful novel and his second acclaimed collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children.
- Sales Rank: #256600 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-10-13
- Released on: 2009-10-13
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Young and old struggle for spiritual survival against the often crushing obstacles of the inner city in these 14 moving stories of African American life in Washington, D.C. Traveling street by street through the nation's capital, Jones introduces a wide range of characters, each of whom has a distinct way of keeping the faith. Betsy Ann Morgan, "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," finds inspiration in the birds she cares for on the roof of her apartment building. Middle-aged Vivian Slater leads a hymn-singing group in "Gospel." The narrator of "The Store" labors to build up a neighborhood grocery; in "His Mother's House," Joyce Moses collects photographs and cares for the expensive home her young son has bought her with his crack earnings. Depicting characters who strive to preserve fragile bonds of family and community in a violent, tragic world, Jones writes knowingly of their nontraditional ways of caring for one another and themselves. His insightful portraits of young people and frank, unsensationalized depictions of horrifying social ills make this a poignant and promising first effort.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-- In these 14 stories set in black neighborhoods of Washington, DC in the '60s and '70s, Jones establishes a mood and a specific sense of place, but he also presents universal hopes and aspirations. Beautifully and economically written, the selections are filled with revealing details of poverty and degradation, and yet the protagonists are survivors who look to find hope and meaning in their lives. The haunting, grainy black-and-white photographs add to the real, though slightly hazy, atmosphere and reveal the underlying grit portrayed so evocatively in the prose. A more-than-worthwhile addition. --Susan H. Woodcock, Potomac Library, Woodbridge, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Phenomenal!
By Amazon Customer
I have a strange suspicion that I would not have read Lost in the City if Edward P. Jones had not won the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World. And I think that would have been a big, big mistake.
This is an excellent collection of short stories, even for someone who doesn't really know a thing about Washington, D.C. or the people who live there. The stories aren't short stories in the most traditional sense - they don't end with surprising or inevitable events or revelations. But each and every glimpse into the lives of these characters is interesting, thoughtful, and specific. Jones manages to paint a colorful, human, and memorable picture of the lives of each of the characters he introduces.
Perhaps the most arresting part of his the stories, for me, is the language. There are so many passages that I will remember, but I will only share a few. In the story "Young Lions," a character named Caesar says to his girlfriend that he loves her:
"I'm glad you told me," she said. "I was beginning to wonder. You made my day."
He promised to fix her dinner before to went to Manny's and he told her once again that he loved her.
"I wish I could record that," she said, "and play it back any time I wanted."
These lines alone told me so, so much about the girlfriend, Carol, and I know that I won't forget her. Later, a character in a story called "The Sunday Following Mother's Day" notes that her father "sounded like every black country person she had ever heard, those people who talked of fetchin this and wearin britches and someone commencin to do such and such." I laughed out loud, because I, too, know some of these country people, and Jones's description is perfect. In the last story, "Marie," Jones write that Marie "was eighty-six years old, and had learned that life was all chaos and painful uncertainty and that the only way to get through it was to expect to chaos even in the most innocent of moments. Offer a crust of bread to a sick bird and you often drew back a bloody finger."
Another delightful aspect of the book is that characters don't disappear at the end of a story. The two teenage girls who appear briefly in "The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed," pregnant and moving in together, show up again as adults with 20-year old sons in "His Mother's House." Two other characters in "Rhonda Ferguson" also appear in their own story in "A Butterfly on F Street." There are a few other characters who appear twice, and I believe that several minor characters in this collection will appear in Jones's next short story collection, which should be published this year. (One of the stories was already published in the New Yorker.) I can't wait to read them all.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Great Collection by a Gifted Writer
By Jonathan Carr
This collection, first published in 1992, was considered Jones's first literary effort. I find this idea of firsts interesting and would like to look at it briefly before I move on to a few of the craft elements in his stories that I would most like to steal.
This collection of short stories was published a decade before Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World." Some of the stories in the collection were first published in the 1980s in literary magazines like Ploughshares and Callaloo. One of the stories "Marie" also appeared in the Paris Review in 1992. The thing that I find interesting is that these publications do not seem to register with the general public or even reviewers. Instead, his books are presented as sudden, award winning events. Instead of a writing career spanning 25 years of craft and respectable publications, we are presented with the image of a of sudden event, a spectacular storm, a writer whose first novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
In any event, the first thing I did when I opened "Lost in the City" was to read the opening lines of each story. I wanted to see how and where he began his stories. I was thinking of an essay by Debra Spark called "Getting In and Getting Out." The essay appears in "Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life." There is an anecdote in the essay about a friend the author who is screening stories for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. She says, "If I have to read another story that begins `The alarm clock rang,' I'll shoot myself."
Although I have never started a story with this particular phrase, I do tend to begin a story at the beginning. So as I read through the Jones collection I paid particular attention to the places he began his stories.
In "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," Jones begins the narrative at some undefined future moment when the crisis of the story has already forced the characters' world to change. "Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone through the kitchen window...." The story never travels completely forward into the world from which these first lines are described. However, the story does end with a certain inevitability--a sort of narrative arc that points forward so that we understand how the characters arrive to the point we find them in the opening of the story.
"The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" covers a lot of ground in twenty-five pages. It outlines the decay of a Black, D.C. neighborhood and shows us how that decay affects the community. On one level it is a story about a father's coming to fatherhood as well as his young daughter's coming of age. It is about the place and the power of the natural world even in the urban environment. It is about an urban Black community on the edge of change.
The narrative is carried along by the story of the young girl and her pigeons. The story is usually told through a close third person narrator; however, the point of view does shift at times from the young girl, Betsy Ann Morgan, to other characters. These shifts offer insight into the community in which Betsy and her father live. But these shifts seldom last for more than a line or two and then quickly move back to Betsy.
I paid close attention to these shifts in point of view. But before I discuss them I would like to think a bit more about where these stories begin.
Another story that begins post-crisis is "The First Day." The story opens with the line: "On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and..." This is the story about a child's first day of school. The story is short, only 5 pages, but it has taken a common event, a child's first day of school, and uses it to point out the divisions between social classes in the Black community. One of the interesting things about this story is that it is told in the first person. The protagonist never reaches the crisis described in the first line within the span of the story. The narrator shows nothing but love and admiration for her mother throughout the course of the story. We are lead by that single clause, "long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother," and the trajectory of the story to understand that the protagonists shame is inevitable.
I find it fascinating that he entire story hinges on this single clause. We never see a hint of shame in the narrator aside from her opening line. If that clause were deleted we would not necessarily know that the narrator would ever come to be ashamed of her mother. But knowing this first line and following the trajectory of the story we know that the crisis and the change are inevitable.
Jones also opens his stories from the middle. The narrator then takes the story back to that middle before moving farther forward. He does this in the story "A New Man."
"A New Man" begins with the lines, "One day in late October, Woodrow L. Cunningham came home early with his bad heart and found his daughter with two boys." The narrative eventually makes its way back to explain exactly how Woodrow came to find his daughter with two boys, but it does not stop there. The narrative continues. It carries the story farther. We come to understand exactly what this event means in the life of Woodrow and how it comes to define his essential character.
Now, rather than continue with this idea of how or where Jones begins his stories, I would like to move on to two other divices Jones uses: point of view, and the idea of epiphany and change within a character.
As I mentioned earlier, Jones does not shy away from changing the narrative point of view if it serves the story. But the places where he shifts point of view seem to be dependent on a few things. He only ever shifts in a third person narrative. The point of view never shifts for more than three or four sentences. The point of view only shifts in stories that are 20 pages in length or longer. He always quickly brings the point of view back to its original place.
It is the brevity in the shift that I find most interesting. It is like one of those little flashes of insight that Woolf wrote about--matches struck unexpectedly in the dark--or the mirror in Joyce's "The Dead." The shift lets us see for a moment how the character looks within their world. For example the title story of the collection, "Lost in the City," is told by a close third person narrator. However, there are two moments in the story where the focus shifts from the protagonist, Lydia Walsh, to her taxi driver. The first shift occurs about two thirds through the story: "He thought that maybe she had been born elsewhere, that she did not know Washington, would not know the streets beyond what the white people called the federal enclave." This shift in point of view ends quickly. The narrator brings our focus back to Lydia. "But in fact, the farther north he went, the more she knew about where they were going."
At the end of "Lost in the City," the point of view again shifts for a moment. "The cab driver thought that her crying meant that maybe it had finally hit her that her mother had died and that soon his passenger would be coming to herself."
I suspect that it is the brevity of these shifts that make them work. Another aspect of these shifts is the fact that they are subtly revealing--not deeply or overtly revealing--and they are always revealing something in the protagonist. These shifts in point of view seem to stress the importance of community in these stories. They show, however briefly, that these characters do not live in isolation, that on some level they are always aware of themselves within the context of others--or perhaps it is that we should always be aware of them within the context of a greater community.
The final aspect of this collection of stories that I would like to look at relates to an issue raised in an essay by Jim Shepard titled, "I Know Myself Real Well. That's the Problem." In this essay, Shepard criticizes the tendency for novice fiction to create characters who are "whooshing along the conveyor belts" of narrative toward some kind of epiphany. Given that my stories have this tendency, I am curious how Jones creates a sense of movement and revelation without allowing his characters to fall into that whooshing conveyor belt.
One way that Jones avoids this narrative conveyor belt is by beginning the story someplace other than the beginning and ending the story in a place that points to the inevitability of change or crisis, but he does not necessarily show us that change or crisis. This can also be seen in the story, "The First Day." We do not experience the moment when the narrator becomes ashamed of her mother. We are told in the opening line that the narrator will indeed one day be ashamed of her mother. We are lift at the end of the story with the inevitability that, despite the strength and character of the mother, the child will one day become as ashamed of her as other members of the community.
Often in this collection of stories the narrator is not even aware of his or her change. The reader senses that something is in fact permanently altered, but it is difficult to say exactly what that thing is. At the close of the story "My Mother's House," we do not find the protagonist, a mother whose biological son has just murdered by her godson over a dispute involving drugs and money, in the throws of some sort of epiphany.
Her husband, who is not the father of either child, works as a bodyguard for her biological son. Her husband skulks away from the scene of the crime, leaving her in the street to comfort her dieing godson. She has always known that her husband was a weak man. At the close of this story we find the protagonist drinking a fifth of vodka and walking from room to room in the house her drug-dealing son purchased for her. She unlocks all the doors and windows, "for Santiago (her son) had no key to her house. And outside that house there was a very cruel would and she did not like to think that her child was out there without a place to come to."
The protagonist knows throughout the story that the world is indeed cruel. The cruelty is not a revelation. Nor does she necessarily seem poised to make some sort of change. In fact, she opens her house in a rough neighborhood so that her son, who has just murdered her godson and pointed a gun at her face, may come into the house for comfort.
Perhaps the real change at the end of this story takes place in the reader. After we have experienced this world, we can never view these characters or their world in the same light--we will never be able to read this story in the same way again.
In the end, there are still many more aspects of this collection that will occupy me throughout the coming months. I have marked my copy of the book with many notes. I find myself referring back to them often.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Extraordinary
By Martha B. Spencer
Jones is a very gifted writer; his characters are so believable and real. These are not the happiest of stories, but the quality of his writing is extraordinary. The two stories that stood out for me were "Orange Line to Ballston" and "Marie." Marie is an elderly woman who has outlived three husbands and must deal with the indignity of going for interviews at the Social Security office to be sitting there for hours on end long past the time for her appointment and treated as if she were invisible. Poignant and beautiful portrait of old age.
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