A Class Thing: Interview with Edward P. Jones

A Korean War veteran tries to identify the killer of a local junky, only to discover that this mystery is best left unsolved. A physician becomes apprentice to a root worker. A woman goes to Safeway for some groceries and meets the devil. All these stories can all be found in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a new collection of short fiction by the author of The Known World.

Although their settings range in time from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, these works all take place in Washington, D.C., and they all deal with the ways in which the past intrudes upon the present, and the ways in which the present obliterates the past. The characters in these stories are all black, but, as Edward P. Jones explained in a recent conversation, that’s really just an accident of geography: The common thread that runs through these tales is class, not race. In one way or another, poverty defines the universe these characters inhabit. That’s just one of the topics discussed in my interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, which you can read here.

Comments

A Class Thing: Interview with Edward P. Jones

A Korean War veteran tries to identify the killer of a local junky, only to discover that this mystery is best left unsolved. A physician becomes apprentice to a root worker. A woman goes to Safeway for some groceries and meets the devil. All these stories can all be found in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a new collection of short fiction by the author of The Known World.

Although their settings range in time from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, these works all take place in Washington, D.C., and they all deal with the ways in which the past intrudes upon the present, and the ways in which the present obliterates the past. The characters in these stories are all black, but, as Edward P. Jones explained in a recent conversation, that’s really just an accident of geography: The common thread that runs through these tales is class, not race. In one way or another, poverty defines the universe these characters inhabit. That’s just one of the topics discussed in my interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, which you can read here.