I'd been a fan of the short stories of Edward P. Jones for a good while. So, my expectations going into his Lost in the City collection were high. Not only were these stories his, but they were all about my city. Each was set in Washington, ranging in decade from the '50s through what appeared to be the '90s. At the near end, the change began to blend.

The collection didn't disappoint. For a D.C. native, the stories occurred where you worked, where you went to school, where you lived, in an age preceding. Quotable lines were scarce, but that feeling wasn't too true. Quotable lines were all over, but you recognized the real power in the accumulation. Choosing one sentence for this blog post would have left out a hundred others. Worse, the choice would have left out the paragraphs. The slope was slippery enough to lead to a full-scale, all out, most definitely fine-able and jail-able copyright infringement.

As a result, in recommending the book to you, I wanted to mention my favorite stories. That effort fell apart when my list started to include most of the stories. "The Store," at first, seemed an easy favorite pick, with the writing style evolving as the narrator did. Then the brilliant short, short "The First Day," from a small child's perspective, took the lead. Then the viciousness of "The Sunday Following Mother's Day" and "Young Lions" won out. A half-hour later, I remembered how "A New Man" kept me up at night — and how the closing "A Rich Man" made me rush to bookmark the link to buy Jones' subsequent collection.

In the end, I decided it was best to share from Jones' recent "Shacks," his New Yorker essay about beginning to write. (Summer Fiction issue, thanks.) Jones began because there was a girl and she lived far away.

"Imagining as best I could what a young woman at the front door of the rest of her life might want to hear from a young man, I put all the hope I had into each letter, using the limited language of an eighteen-year-old who knew books of mathematics but not much else," explains Jones about months of letter-writing. "It is amazing the little shacks of life we can build when it seems that so much is at stake."

When people found out that Angelo Billings, Caesar's cousin, had in fact stolen the flowers from an I Street florist and taken to the funeral home, they said he would never again have good luck. Never mind, they said, that he loved Caesar's mother as much as he loved anyone and that stealing the flowers was his way of showing that love. There were some things that God would not tolerate, and stealing flowers for the dead was one of them.

Caesar, though, was moved, and they grew closer after his mother's funeral. Angelo introduced him to Sherman. Angelo, before Caesar gave up on school, would wait for him outside Cardozo High, and they would go to Sherman's two-bedroom apartment on 16th Street, a few blocks up from Malcolm X Park. What fascinated Caesar most about the apartment was the dominance of sound, of noise, as if Sherman were afraid of silence. In every room, there was something playing each second of the day, whether a radio or television or cassette player. In the bathroom, hanging from the shower curtain rod, there was a transistor radio that played around the clock. Sherman lived alone in the apartment, but he had two children by Sandra, who lived elsewhere in the building with the children. Most of the time when Caesar and Angelo visited, they would find Sherman wrapped in his bathrobe sitting on the couch, listening to one of dozens cassette tapes that Sandra had recorded of the children talking and playing with each other. There were four speakers in the living room that stood three feet high, and he enjoyed playing those cassettes so loud that the noise of the children made it sound like a playground with a hundred children. Now and again, one child would hit the other or say something mean and there would  be a fit of crying on the tape. Sherman would jump up and speed the tape past the crying to a place where the talking and playing resumed.

From "Young Lions" in Edward P. Jones' Lost in the City short-story set.

There's been so much volume and diversity in the feeds this week, it's difficult to know what else to say or to offer a real reaction instead of an effect. Let's steal the reaction above until the tape noise subsides.

Read Neely Tucker's Post profile of Edward P. Jones. Amid it:

He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver's license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.

He has a friend cut his hair instead of going to the barbershop. Cooking, he says, is plunking a chicken in the oven "until it doesn't bleed when I stick it." He has a fondness for soul food, most particularly chitlins. If he is to have dinner with friends on, say, Wednesday, "I start worrying about it on Sunday. It sort of eats the whole week up, and then I get there, and I have a wonderful time and wonder what I was so worried about."

The story is somehow the Post's first full-length profile of Jones. Maybe I'm missing something, but beyond reviews, the longest previous piece is '05 coverage of the never-learned-how-to-do-drive author's reading at a Volvo dealership (the last time I blogged about Jones in the Post).

But Tucker more than makes up for lost time. Watching Jones, you get closer to the roots of his storytelling and purposefully sparse existence than in any profile of him you've read, yet you're consistently reminded you know relatively nothing, same as Jones, as Tucker, as everyone.

A caution: Don't visit the gallery. The photos are good, but one breaks the story's spell too easily and feels internally spiteful/sloppy. I'm sure there's no story-perspective-destroying spite at work, but poor form.

Do you live in New York? If so, you need to go somewhere for me. The New Yorker Festival is coming up fast, and many of this blog's favorites are going to be there.

Who, you ask? Scheduled are: Edward P. Jones ("Volvo," "By twenty five," "D.C., New York, memory"), Karen Russell ("Reading Karen Russell," "The cover: The word 'Stories' in the wolf's bite") Jonathan Franzen ("Sending the tablet into the sea," "On reading"), Orhan Pamuk ("All the drunk collected tokens," "The best part of the 'Journeys' issue"), Malcolm Gladwell ("A most reasonable 'fro," "Before the Super Bowl"), Jeffrey Toobin, and many more. Enough? I want John McPhee to canoe-surf the crowd, but I'm not holding my breath.

Whenever Edward P. Jones writes the fiction piece in the New Yorker, I get a little sneaky kind of happiness. His stories in the magazine are usually based in Washington, with real street names and neighborhoods and schools, and to somebody else it's just another town or a setting, but to me it's sliding in under the eyes of New York with its attitude. This Capital City has more than its bureaucrats, Jones is saying, just like your metropolis has more than its corporate power. The equivalence is obvious, but you don't often see the facts taking shape.

My favorite Jones passage from August's double issue:

Terence was at her door that evening, asking a beaming Hamilton Palmer, who had also gone to Howard, how he was doing these warm days and then asking the father if he might talk a bit with his daughter this evening. Terence and Sharon stepped out onto the porch, and he invited her to a movie and a meal on Friday night. She had had two dates before — and one of those had been with a young man who was brother to her cousin's husband. Sharon was not one to keep a diary, but, if she had been, that meeting of a few minutes with Terence would have taken up at least two pages.

A distraction before a leap. You can read the full story here, with a 2004 interview with Jones explaining why he writes about Washington. And if you read the second half of this issue back to front, you arrive next at John Updike's piece on the waning works of authors and get a challenge added to the Jones story. Updike writes:

Publishing his dreams was for Greene a way of reentering a past that had become permeable and as fascinately real as a dream. Remembrance, always an element in the manipulated data of fiction, is often finally fruitful in purer form, when living presences that once crowded and threatened the rebellious imagination have been rendered by the passage of time mistily distant and legally impotent.

There's arguments to be made about memory here, but the idea of living presences vs. rebellious imagination sits internally and stews. If there's a resolution later, the conflict now seems to be more the issue.

New Yorker, Dec. 20 and 27, 2004. Winter Fiction issue.

Aside one. Jeffrey Toobin's "High Tea" is worth sticking around to the end.

Aside two. W.G. Sebald writes "An Attempt at Restitution," about life in Germany after World War II, especially life in Stuttgart.

Local Pulitzer winner Edward P. Jones adds "Adam Robinson." The man whom the story surrounds thinks about the city's trees, especially the ones that don't get the love of the cherry blossoms. As someone who grew up under a Washngton oak tree, I appreciate his thoughts.

And then there's a sampling of Robert Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop.

"All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing-I suppose that's what vocation means-at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say."

A week or so ago, local author Edward P. Jones did a reading from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World. The reading was held at a Volvo dealership.

"I've read you're a very private person," one driver asked. "How did you get out here? Did they promise you a car?"

Jones offered a shy smile. "I don't drive."

The reading at the car dealership may have been one of the stranger marriages of highbrow art and the mass market. Even Jones said afterward that when he got the invitation, he figured that he'd be appearing at a school or in a conference room. "I've never been in a car dealership before, not having a car," he mused. "But I used to pass by here on the bus."

He never imagined holding forth in the display room, he said, the members of the audience as exposed to the night through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows and bright showroom lights as the latest-model automobiles. "I wonder how they got the cars out."

More.