All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

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." “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 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." 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. All Aunt Hagar's Children Stories By Edward P. Jones HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2007 Edward P. Jones All right reserved. ISBN: 9780060557577 Chapter One In the Blink of God's Eye That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown. The wife, Ruth Patterson, knew what wolves could do: she had an uncle who went to Alaska in 1895 to hunt for gold, an uncle who was devoured by wolves not long after he slept under his first Alaskan moon. Still, the night, even in godforsaken Washington, sometimes had that old song that could pull Ruth up and out of her bed, the way it did when she was a girl across the Potomac River in Virginia where all was safe and all was family. Her husband, Aubrey, always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood and never woke. Hearing the song call her from her new bed in Washington, Ruth, ever mindful of the wolves, would take up their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey's still-hairless face and descend to the porch. She was well past seventeen, and he was edging toward eighteen, a couple not even s