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Lost in the City

by Edward P. Jones

4.03 · rating details · 847 ratings · 138 reviews

The nation's capital that serves as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones's prizewinning collection, Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic monuments and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that world into the lives of African American men and women who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense of hope. From "T

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published November 30th 2004 by Amistad Press (first published 1992)

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Dec 29, 2011

Milly rated it

I remember buying this book thinking, great, something new because I had never heard of this author before. The first story was just simply good that I closed the book and savored the story for a minute. I'm not all about the story when I read a book, I'm all about the way that story is told, what feelings it invokes in me if any. And this book made me feel all kinds of good!! I immediately did my homework to find out what else this man had written and when I read his other two works, I was not ...more

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Jan 07, 2011

Clara rated it

UGH! Is there some rule that says that all sort stories must: 1) have some kind of plot twist or surprise, and 2) the surprise must be depressing?

I mean, really? This collection opens with a story about a girl who raises pigeons. It ends with all the pigeons except two being killed by rats (sort of poetically ironic, considering that pigeons are flying rats). The two remaining pigeons escape and stare at the girl from across the way, refusing to come home since they are their c...more

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Mar 13, 2010

Ben rated it

If Edward P. Jones were asked to suggest an epigraph for Lost in the City, I imagine he would give serious thought to the inscription over the door to Plato’s Academy: “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” Much is made of the streets of Washington D.C. both within these stories and within the province of conspiracy theorists. The original street layout of our national capital was designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a Freemason like many of the founding fathers, and the briefest...moreIf Edward P. Jones were asked to suggest an epigraph for Lost in the City, I imagine he would give serious thought to the inscription over the door to Plato’s Academy: “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” Much is made of the streets of Washington D.C. both within these stories and within the province of conspiracy theorists. The original street layout of our national capital was designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a Freemason like many of the founding fathers, and the briefest glance at a city map reveals a number of possibly cultic symbolic interpretations, but such a reductive stance is not the intent of these stories; the author never makes mention of the more mysterious aspects of Washington’s urban design outside of its impact on the lives of his characters—the ways these streets provide the larger framework for tangential interaction. In fact, the first set of streets Mr. Jones locates us in—3rd and L Streets NW—have literally been lost in the city during the construction of Interstate 395.

Rather, these stories are thematically tied together by a sense of place created whole clothe from the vicissitudes of survival on the streets—a sense of place that ultimately threatens to displace the inherent value of a strictly survivalist worldview. I am thinking of how, in many of these stories, the streets come to define themselves both within the characters and upon the characters. It is, at times, a matter of subtle word choice. By way of example in “The Girl who Raised Pigeons” we get “…she smelled what seemed a mixture of dirt and rainy air and heard a heart that seemed to be hurling itself against the wall of the bird’s breast,” in which the body of the bird is described as having a wall. In contrast with this, we are told, “She sang on into the night for herself alone, her voice pushing back everything she did not yet understand,” in the final sentence of “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed”—I think thematically this “pushing back” is walling the boundaries between the known and the unknowable.

Other times this interaction happens in a more radical and overt fashion, tied closer to plot and story structure. For instance, characters in “The Store,” “Lost in the City,” and “Marie” use the streets to retrace the pathways of their lives and memories of the city. In “The Sunday Before Mother’s Day,” Samuel “Pookie” Williams II uses streets to define what he can and cannot accept from life, frequently lapsing into the first person plural “we” as he talks of himself—almost as if he cannot know himself outside of how he is known by others. By example, here is a passage from his longest speaking part: “…I been all over the damn world, …so when I came back I knew what I wanted to put in my own world, and he’ll never be in it…. We have our wife and child, and you and Maddie and Hazel’s family.”

By further extension of this when the action of a story becomes violent or unpredictable, the details given often take on a geometrical quality. In the aforementioned story, we are told in a description of a pool of blood that: “The floor tilted, and so the blood had flowed through the night in several thin lines from the dead woman, and one line had been heading directly toward where Maddie was standing in the doorway.” After the climactic violence of “Young Lions” Caesar and Carol exit each other’s lives along diagonal lines—she walking away on Massachusetts and he heading north on 17th, looking over his shoulder “expecting something or someone.” Perhaps one of the more interesting examples comes in “Marie” when the title character slaps a Social Security secretary and the action immediately follows not the impact of the slap but the smaller incidence of a dropped fingernail file striking the floor.

Of course, there is more at play than the significance of streets and geometry in Lost in the City. Stormy weather plays a major role as does music. There is also a specific dialect to which the author tunes the stories, but even these qualities feel subordinate to the streets. For a collection of stories about city life, more than half of the action takes place outside on the streets and, by extension, is under the influence of the city environment more so than some sort of controlled indoor atmosphere.

There are the bigger questions of the city’s changing racial identity and familiar ties to the south, which often underscore the characters’ various perspectives, but even these play out into the streets as we find the advent of MLK and Malcolm X on streets and place names. The book ends paradoxically insofar as—when taken in conjunction with the title—the last sentence hints that part of the peoples’ voice isn’t so much leant to the streets as lost in the maze. Still, tonally this final note is pitch-perfect for the bittersweet nostalgia that threads through these stories.(less)

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Nov 01, 2009

Bap rated it

Shelves: short-stories

This was Edward P. Jones first book. It is an amazing collection of stories centered around ordinary black people in DC. showing that ordinary people can be the stuff of extraordinary writing. These are not stories with a suprise ending or a message. Rather they are a slice of life with people who you might be sitting next to on the bus. Jones is not judgmental. They are all gods creatures, they are in one way or another lost in the city.

I know Edward if only slightly and he is ...more

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Jun 22, 2009

Bill rated it

Lost in the city is an apt and appropriate title for these 14 short stories. All take place in the African-American sections of Washington DC and all of the characters are black.

The first story, The Girl Who Raised Pigeons, demonstrates that the characters are real and that they have the same feelings of love and self that whites have. Betsy Ann is eight when she first sees pigeons being raised by a barber friend of her father. It is love at first sight. Over the years she bothe...moreLost in the city is an apt and appropriate title for these 14 short stories. All take place in the African-American sections of Washington DC and all of the characters are black.

The first story, The Girl Who Raised Pigeons, demonstrates that the characters are real and that they have the same feelings of love and self that whites have. Betsy Ann is eight when she first sees pigeons being raised by a barber friend of her father. It is love at first sight. Over the years she bothers her father for pigeons of her own. He relents and they construct a coop on their apartment roof. The flock grows. But the telling part, the indication of great paternal love, is that her taxicab-driving father gets up every morning before Betsy Ann wakes up and inspects the coop to spare her the sight of any dead birds.

The Store and Young Lions demonstrate the characters provincialism, lack of education, victims of their environment and their being generally helpless. The Store is told in the first person and the protagonist is unnamed. In his late teens he looks and finds a job in a small grocery store owned and managed by Mrs. Jenkins. She is a strict taskmaster and at first mistrusts him. As years go by she gives him more and more responsibility. She finally physically leaves and he becomes the store manager. He and Mrs. Jenkins meet infrequently away from the store. All is well until he receives a letter from Mrs. Jenkins telling him that the store is sold. The letter contains $4,000 in “Severin pay.” His whole experience is based on the store. He does not know where to turn. He is lost in the city.

Caesar in Young Lions tries and eventually convinces his girlfriend, Carol, to participate in a scam. Together they talk an older woman to remove her savings from a bank in cash. They rob her and in the process Carol ends up with the cash. Caesar pushes Carol into a park and, in an attempt to get the cash beats her. But Carol is tough and strong, holds onto the cash and walks away. The story ends with,

“There was something in the air, but he (Caesar) could not make out what it was. He walked out of the park. He kept looking behind him, expecting something or someone, be he was alone in the street and he saw nothing but the swirling of dead leaves. He continued looking behind him as he made his way up 17th Street. He took out the address book, but found that he could not read the name or the numbers under the feeble streetlights. He hurried, hoping for a telephone booth where the light would be brighter. He began to run, and as he ran, he kept trying to read the numbers, but the rain was now turning them to blurs. He did not know what was in the air. He only knew that tonight would not be a night without shelter.”

He was lost in the city.
(less)

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Jan 27, 2012

Roger DeBlanck rated it

Edward P. Jones’ first book Lost in the City is a collection of short stories that take place in settings around the Washington D.C. area, Jones’ hometown. The depth to which he explores his characters is the force of the collection. Through the use of simple language, Jones’ captivating style holds readers attention as he explores topics that are disturbing, sad, and raw, but also compassionate. The stories note loss, crime, and wrongdoing, but they do not judge. A dominating theme comes throug...more

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Apr 03, 2011

Mikki rated it

Shelves: short-stories

"On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school."

So begins The First Day, one of the fourteen character driven short stories drawn from Edward P. Jones' award winning book, "Lost in the City." It is the story of an illiterate mother who sacrifices pride and seeks help from a stranger in order to get her young dau...more

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Jul 02, 2011

ABookVacation rated it

I had to read this compilation of short stories for a course I took in order to teach AP classes. Quite honestly, I’m not really one to enjoy compilations of short stories—I tend to avoid them in the classroom and I rarely read them for fun because I don’t care for them. Needless to say, I really didn’t care for this book. The short stories weren’t interesting to me, and I personally found a majority of them inappropriate. Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I don’t think that every story needs r...more

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Mar 14, 2011

meeners rated it

Shelves: short-stories

A few people came and went about her, but the snow now covered the windows of her car and all she could make out were shadows moving about. She could hear voices, but she could not understand any of what people said, as if all sound were being filtered by the snow and turned into garble. She could not anymore read her watch, but she continued to tell herself that in the next minute she would start up the car and go home to Ralph. In the end, it grew cold in the car, and colder still, and at firs...more

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Feb 09, 2010

Matt rated it

I'm not generally a short stories reader, but this is a fantastic collection, especially if you're a native or resident of DC. All 14 stories take place in historically African American neighborhoods of the District in the second half of the 20th century. They are all stories of struggle, told through patient and poignant vignettes of a whole cast of characters and the communities they are a part of.

While all worth reading, my favorites are:
The Girl Who Raised Pigeons
The...more

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Nov 19, 2009

The Awdude rated it

These stories are just about as good as contemporary short fiction gets. Jones loves and explores his displaced tragic characters with an unparalleled depth of feeling. It's a breath of fresh air to read a narrative that doesn't completely detach itself from its characters like much of today's postmodern literature. His plots keep you thoroughly engaged because he never interrupts them with thematic heavy-handedness. His stories by themselves speak about the human condition in ways that, if ...more

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Mar 22, 2009

Kathy rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, reviewed

I loved these stories. They were beautiful, little slices of life. Each sliver was richly described with characters you could really feel for. There is no pretty little bow at the end of these stories, but I liked that too -- the story ended, but you knew that wasn't the end (though it doesn't leave you unsatisfied in any way). In a couple of cases, you see recurring characters and it's a sweet surprise to know how those lives turned out. There's a lot of heartbreak and a lot of strength. ...more

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Jul 23, 2007

Jason rated it

While many American cultural treasures rest on walls, under glass, or in archives in stodgy institutions in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. is rarely thought of as a place that inspires and brings life to original works of art that speak of the District as a "real" city where "real" people live. It is certainly not, for instance, New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, as a beacon of American culture.

When a work comes along, however, that brings something ...more

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Jul 05, 2007

Jane rated it

Her mother dies from a brain tumor, and, years later, rats infiltrate the rooftop coop, in which the girl keeps her pigeons, and maim and kill them. A woman tells the story of a family's instant death by lightning. A teenage girl runs away; her father spends the rest of his years going door-to-door, looking for her. A young crook, Caesar, convinces his girlfriend, Carol, to help him swindle the savings of a retarded woman. A lawyer hires a cab driver to "get us lost in the city" (1...more

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May 28, 2010

Moyo Myers rated it

No polished review, just really enjoying this book of short stories by Edward P. Jones. This is the first book by him that I have read, so this is my introduction to his style of writing. Apparently he writes his stories completely in his head before ever putting them on paper. This is reflected in his writing style, I think. His short stories present themselves as complete mental images. I am really looking forward to reading the rest! The story "The First Day" is my favorite so...more

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Feb 26, 2011

Stephanie rated it

This man is a genius! While reading "The Known World" I grew rather impressed with his style and development of each character but reading this novel has shown me how far his genius goes. If a reader does not pay close attention they will miss the connections that he makes during the short stories and now I understand why a previous reader did not like this book. You really should not put it down once reading unless you can remember the smallest detail which become important. *On page...more

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Aug 19, 2009

Anne Sanow rated it

This is Jones's first book, and in it you can glimpse the careful, direct manner of character development and fully realized world (in this case, Washington D.C.) that were put to such masterful use in "The Known World." These are all wonderful stories; some of them surprise you with their shifts (Jones deftly avoids any judgement), while others don't gain as much traction. Nothing negative to say--I just think that his later stories are more hard-hitting, and I'm so blown away by th...more

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Nov 09, 2008

Tony rated it

Shelves: fiction-short-stories

Jones, Edward P. LOST IN THE CITY. (1992). *****. This author burst on the scene with this, his first collection of short stories. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. Jones, a native of Washington, D.C. and a current resident of Arlington, VA, writes his stories set in D.C. that explore the lives of a variety of black residents. These are some of the best stories you will ever read – full of compassion and wit – but as down-to-earth as you c...more

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Mar 16, 2010

Jack Bullion rated it

Shelves: listened-to, 2010

I resisted this collection for a long time, partly because I didn't particularly enjoy The Known World and its plodding, deliberate prose style, which I mistook for something much more simplistic than it actually was. Since then I've become a much more patient reader, more capable of giving a writer like Jones my full attention. Which is good, considering that beneath Jones' rather plainspoken approach are narrative structures every bit as knotty as Alice Munro's. Jones' sentences span lifetimes...more

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Jul 03, 2010

Caroline rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: moyo

WOW! This is a selection of stories voiced by members of D.C.'s black population, sprawling across the last 50 years. Mr. Jones is ferociously talented. Unusually for me, I actually LOVED when he used a female voice. I think anyone who read Sapphire's PUSH should try this out to get that little piece of their heart back.

(Not that they are telling the same story, because they aren't)

Thanks to Moyo and Goodreads for the heads up.

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Oct 01, 2007

Greg rated it

· review of another edition

A surprisingly uneven collection, with stunning stories like "A New Man," "The Store," and "Gospel" counterpoised against others that feel oddly jumbled, somehow malformed.

Perhaps this perception of misshapen-ness on my part comes from the careful emotional restraint with which Jones delivers these stories. At his best, Jones can be Chekhovian, writing with a balanced, almost judicial empathy for each and every character in a piece, a kind of cool broad...more

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Jan 30, 2012

Juan Alvarado Valdivia rated it

After reading his short story "The First Day" a few years ago, I was excited about reading this book. I was disappointed throughout, though. Barely three stars for me; more like 2 3/4 (and he redeemed himself a bit with the extra short story they included in this edition, which I really liked cuz I guess I like stories about old men who turn to drugs and banging young broads after their prude-wife dies). His writing style was just boring for me. Who writes "gotdammit" ins...more

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Aug 12, 2010

Bethann rated it

Shelves: american-literature, short-stories, award-winners, contemporary, read-in-2010

After reading (and loving) Jones' Pulitzer winning novel, The Known World, I was very curious about his first short story collection, especially when I discovered that not only is genre completely different, but the setting is contemporary Washington, DC as opposed to the pre-Civil War south depicted in his novel. I thought this collection was oddly mismatched. Some of the stories were gripping, poignant and starkly realistic slices of life...and others felt far short of the mark. However, the g...more

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Jul 27, 2010

Sarah rated it

Shelves: read-in-2010

I don't normally feel satisfied after reading short story collections (I just prefer novels), but Caroline T gave such a glowing review I had to check this out. I enjoyed the stories a lot, especially since this collection was light on the "epiphany stories" that are so prevalent these days. The characters, however, pushed this to 5 stars.

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Jan 10, 2008

Rick rated it

Shelves: fiction

Lost in the City is Jones’s first published book. He since published a prize winning novel and another prize-winning collection of short stories. He is the real deal. All the stories are set in Washington, D.C., not Gore Vidal’s political capitol but the part people like Vidal and those he writes about avoids. Working class, middle class, and impoverished Black D.C. Ministers, lawyers, drug dealers, gospel singers, grocers, and the retired and abandoned are the characters whose lives grace this ...more

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Dec 21, 2008

Barbara rated it

Edward P. Jones wrote The Known World which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his first and second collection of stories are finalists for the national book award. The stories are captivating, and I couldn't put the book down. His other collection is called All Aunt Hagar's Children, but I loved the first one better.

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Mar 10, 2010

Jill rated it

These are some of the best short stories I have ever read (and I have read MANY excellent ones). They were long enough to satisfy me, and I wasn't frustrated when I finished one (as long as I knew there was another one to read). I hated to finish the book, but then I remembered there is another collection...

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Dec 04, 2010

Annie is currently reading it

I am really enjoying this book. Thanks Kathleen! It shows a side of Washington, DC that most visitors, tourists and NW residents fail to notice. Last night I finished "The NIght Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed" and had to pause. Cassandra came alive to me. I could feel her anger and sadness.

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Sep 16, 2011

Scott rated it

A collection of short stories all set in Washington, DC by an author that recently won the Pulitzer. It's generally not about the DC that I know, but there was enough familiarity to make it more interesting. To be fair, I've decided that short stories aren't my favorite medium, but this was probably one of the better collections that I have read.

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Jul 11, 2011

Christine rated it

Shelves: shortfiction

This one is a slow burn. At first you're like, "What?" and then you're like, "Hmm..." and then it's all "Oh!" I will be thinking about Jones's story-writing skills, stories in which nothing much seems to happen or way too much seems to happen, for many years to come. If anyone's read The Known World I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

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About Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, and his first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. His most recent collection, All Aun...more

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