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Title details for All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones - Available

All Aunt Hagar's Children

Stories

by Edward P. Jones
Peter Francis James
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C. home. Yet it's not the city's movers and shakers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them in the city, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 5, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780792745785
      • File size: 432443 KB
      • Duration: 15:00:55

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Peter Francis James's melodious baritone is beautifully suited to this fine collection of short stories by Edward P. Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his earlier novel, THE KNOWN WORLD. The stories are predominantly about Southerners moving North to Washington, D.C., in the early and mid-twentieth century; although set relatively recently, they are replete with passages that seem as if they should begin "once upon a time." Accordingly, James speaks with a warmth and rhythm that invite listeners to settle back and listen. His pacing, particularly his use of telling pauses, is adept. And he shades characters with just enough personality to color the already-vivid scenes. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 4, 2006
      Coming after the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World, Jones's second collection of stories journeys the length and breadth of Washington, D.C., past and present, for inspiration. James, stentorian and assured, sounds like an East Coast version of Charlton Heston's Moses, intoning Jones's prose like a contemporary version of the 10 Commandments. There is an odd disjunction between James's mostly uninflected reading and the heavily accented dialect he provides for Jones's characters when they speak, but James makes it work. Jones, acclaimed as one of the most talented American writers currently at work, composes smooth, measured prose that demands a reader like James, who follows the ebb and flow of Jones's stories like the score of an opera.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 19, 2006
      Following the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Known World
      (2003), Jones offers a complex, sometimes somber collection of 14 short stories, four of which have appeared in the New Yorker
      . As in his previous collection of short fiction, Lost in the City
      (1992), Jones centers his storytelling on his native Washington, D.C. Here, though, Jones broadens his chronological scope to encompass virtually the entire 20th century and a wide range of experiences and African-American perspectives, from a man who has kept the secret of his adultery for 45 years, to another whose most difficult task on leaving prison for murder is having dinner with his brother's family. Often, Jones presents characters who have been away from the South long enough to mourn the loss of values and connections they traded for the too-often failed promise of urban success, but he also portrays the nation's capital as a place of potential redemption, where small curses and small miracles intertwine, and where shifting communities and connections can literally save one's life. Each of its denizens comes through with his own particular ways and means for survival, often dependent on chance, and rendered with unsentimental sympathy and force: "Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl's heart paused. The man's heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell."

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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