Edward P. Jones’s collection of short stories Lost in the City (1992) won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1993 as well as being nominated for the National Book Award. The fourteen stories in the collection focus on ordinary people in the city of Washington, DC. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” a young girl named Betsy Anne who lives with her widowed father begins to raise pigeons on the roof of her home. As she grows older, the neighborhood begins to change for the worse and people move out. Rats that have infested an abandoned house invade her pigeon coop and kill all her birds. After this, Betsy Anne does not raise pigeons again. “The First Day” follows a young girl getting ready to attend her first day of school with her mother. After accidentally taking her daughter to the wrong school, the woman finally finds the right school. As she begins to fill out admission forms, she reveals to another mother that she is illiterate. Cassandra, a troubled teenage girl, idolizes her friend Rhonda who has become a successful singer in the story “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed.” Cassandra fights with some of her other friends, but they bond over Rhonda’s song and make up. However, when the girls arrive back home later that night they learn that Rhonda has been shot and killed. In “Young Lions,” Caesar, a career criminal, convinces his girlfriend, Carol, to help him rob a mentally challenged woman. Carol feels guilty about the crime, so Caesar beats her, steals the money, and runs away into the night. A young man begins working at a store owned by Penny in “The Store.” Both of them allow Patricia, a poor young woman, to buy on credit. One day, Penny accidentally hits and kills Patricia. She decides to sell the store and gives the young man a large share of the proceeds, which he uses to attend college. A single mother named Maevella takes her children to school on the subway of the title, “The Orange Line Train to Ballston.” The children begin talking to a friendly and handsome man, and Maevella develops a crush on him. Just when they seem to be developing a connection, the man stops riding the subway and Maevella does not see him again. In “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,” Madeline Williams’s father, Samuel, killed her mother. Madeline continues to visit Samuel in prison until she is in her twenties and has a mentally handicapped son. She puts her son in a group home. When Samuel is released from prison, he tries to insert himself back into Madeline’s life in a way that makes her uncomfortable and resentful. After a successful businesswoman hears that her mother has died, she then pays a cab driver to drive her around aimlessly in the titular story “Lost in the City.” The driver thinks that he is showing her places she has never seen, but in fact, the woman grew up in the slums all over the city and she recognizes all the places the driver shows her. In “His Mother’s House,” Santiago is already a successful criminal by the age of eighteen. His violent lifestyle escalates and ends with him murdering a man in front of his mother, Joyce. Santiago goes on the run, but Joyce leaves a window unlocked so he can get in if he ever wants to come home. In “A Butterfly on F Street,” a recently widowed woman goes for a walk and meets the woman with whom her husband cheated on her. Her husband’s mistress expresses sympathy for her loss and the women bond. In “Gospel,” a gospel group of four women arrives at an appointment to find the church on fire. They briefly sing in the street and then head on to their next appointment of the day. Another group tries to recruit Anita, the best singer in the group, but Anita refuses. Woodrow fights with his teenage daughter, who disappears the next day in the story, “A New Man.” The police assume that she ran away from home, though Woodrow keeps searching for a year and a half. Eventually, his wife, Rita, insists that they move away because the house is too painful to live in. “A Dark Night,” is about five female neighbors who gather during a lightning storm. One of them, Ida, has a grating personality that annoys the others. Her former friend, Carmena, is also among the group. After the rest of the women leave, Ida and Carmena stay together. They are both afraid of the storm, so they wait it out in the quietest part of the house. An elderly woman, the “Marie” of the title struggles to live by herself on social security. After a fight with the social security office, she worries her benefits will be cut off. A local student working on a living history project records stories from Marie’s life; she is thrilled to hear the sound of her own voice on tape.

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Edward P. Jones

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Short Story Collection

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Lost in the City

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