From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, edited Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. His 2003 novel The Known World received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Edward Paul Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia. His first book, Lost in the City, is a collection of short stories about the African-American working class in 20th-century Washington, D.C. In the early stories are some who are like first-generation immigrants, as they have come to the city as part of the Great Migration from the rural South. His second book, The Known World, was set in a fictional Virginia county and had a protagonist who was a mixed-race black planter and slaveholder. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Joness third book, All Aunt Hagars Children, was published in 2006. Like Lost in the City, it is a collection of short stories that deal with African Americans, mostly in Washington, D.C. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine. The stories in the book take up the lives of ancillary characters in Lost in the City. In 2007, it was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, which was won by Philip Roths Everyman. The stories of Jones first and third book are connected. As Wyatt Mason wrote in Harpers Magazine in 2006: The fourteen stories of All Aunt Hagars Children revisit not merely the city of Washington but the fourteen stories of Lost in the City. Each new story—and many of them, in their completeness, feel like fully realized little novels—is connected in the same sequence, as if umbilically, to the corresponding story in the first book. Literature is, of course, littered with sequels—its Rabbits and Bechs; its Zuckermans and Kepeshes—but this is not, in the main, Jones’s idea of a reprise. Each revisitation provides a different kind of interplay between the two collections. Neely Tucker wrote in 2009: Its gone almost completely unnoticed, but the two collections are a matched set: There are 14 stories in Lost, ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in Hagars, also ordered from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on. In the spring and fall semesters of 2009, Jones was a visiting professor of creative writing at the George Washington University.[4] In fall 2010 he joined the English department faculty to teach creative writing. Awards and nominations 1992: Nominated National Book Award, Lost in the City 1993: Awarded PEN/Hemingway Award, Lost in the City 1994: Awarded Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Lost in the City[6] 2003: Nominated National Book Award, The Known World 2003: Awarded National Book Critics Circle Award, The Known World 2004: Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Known World 2005: Awarded International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Known World 2005: Awarded MacArthur Fellowship 2007: Nominated PEN/Faulkner Award, All Aunt Hagars Children 2010: Awarded PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story “When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast. The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner ofkeys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out ofthe room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of. Augustus died on Wednesday.” ― Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 12:11:41 +0000
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