Lost in the City

Lost in the City is a 1992 collection of short stories about African-American life in Washington, D.C. by Pulitzer Prize winning-author Edward P. Jones.

Summary

Lost in the City is a collection of 14 stories. The author, a native of Washington,[1] writes about the ordinary residents of the city: "I had read James Joyce's Dubliners, and I was quite taken with what he had done with Dublin. So I set out to do the same thing for Washington, D.C. I went away to college and people have a very narrow idea of what Washington is like. They don't know that it's a place of neighborhoods, for example, and I set out to give a better picture of what the city is like--the other city."[2]

The book starts with the youngest character and ends with the oldest character.[3]

Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children

The structure of Lost in the City mirrors that of All Aunt Hagar's Children, another collection of short stories written by Jones:

The first story in Lost in the City has to do with Betsy Ann and the pigeons, and the first story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children is about the infancy of the man who ultimately gives her the pigeons. The second story of each collection is about schooling of some type and is told in the first person. Penny, the grocer, is introduced in “The Store,” in Lost in the City, and she shows up in the title story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In both of those stories, the narrator is a first-person man, but he has no name, and so on. If I ever do a third collection, it will be like that, too."[3]

Awards and nominations

Lost in the City won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1993 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[4]

References

  1. ↑ "The American Novel: Edward P. Jones". PBS.org.
  2. ↑ "Off the Page: Edward P. Jones". The Washington Post. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  3. 1 2 "Edward P. Jones, The Art of Fiction No. 222". The Paris Review. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  4. ↑ "2003 National Book Award Finalist: Fiction". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
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