1On my first reading of Edward P. Jones’s short stories, the enigmatic openings gripped me. For example, “Every now and again, as if on a whim, the federal government people would write to Marie Delaveaux Wilson in one of those white, stampless envelopes and tell her to come in to their place so they could take another look at her. They, the Social Security people, wrote to her in a foreign language that she had learned to translate over the years . . .” (“Marie” 229). I felt pleasure at Jones’s plain yet evocative language carrying me along:

So on a not unpleasant day in March, she rose in the dark in the morning, even before the day had any sort of character to give herself plenty of time to bathe, eat, lay out money for the bus, dress, listen to the spirituals on the radio. She was eighty-six years old, and had learned that life was all chaos and painful uncertainty and that the only way to get through it was to expect chaos even in the most innocent of moments. Offer a crust of bread to a sick bird and you often drew back a bloody finger. (“Marie” 229-30)

2I found that everyday life was given a new depth by the author’s subtle treatment of emotion—like his character Vivian’s turmoil on perceiving that a friend is involved with “a man who took off his hat”:

She thought it would take only a moment or two to collect herself.

     [I]t came to her . . . that she had not seen a man take off his hat in that old fashioned way in a long, long time. . . . The young women’s cotton print dresses billowed slightly with the summer breezes, and even the billowing itself seemed to a little girl a part of all the secrets and romance that she could not yet take part in. (“Gospel” 199)

3The mystery of Jones’s open endings echoed within me until I was satisfied by their conclusiveness. Vivian’s reaction on that day, for instance, is to park the car in a snowstorm and sit and reminisce, and think about her husband, ill at home. While the danger of the falling temperature is distanced by her thinking it “the general condition of the whole world,” if she does nothing about the growing cold she will freeze. The cold is the correlative of the sadness that has come into her life:

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 first she did not notice, and then when she did, she thought it was the general condition of the whole world, owing to the snow, and that there was not very much she could do about it. (“Gospel” 201)

4Still, there is no accounting for taste: “I didn’t see the point in the stories,” said the friend on whom I had pressed my copy of Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City. “Nothing happens.”

5Many are of the opinion that Jones’s work is admirable. Jones, a Washington native, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World in 2004, and his two short story collections to date, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) have earned him the PEN/Hemingway Award (1993) and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1994) as well as the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story (2010). Yet he deserves to be better-known still. Daniel Davis Wood opened his book Edward P. Jones: New Essays (2011) with the question: “How is it that a man can drag himself out of poverty to become one of America’s most decorated writers and yet remain largely unnoticed by professional critics of American literature?” And he ended his Editor’s Note on the hope that the book would “generate new interest in Jones and . . . encourage future critics to give his work the detailed attention it deserves” (Wood 7). Although James Coleman’s Understanding Edward P. Jones came out in 2016, there is a dearth of academic publications on Jones’s work. There has been one M.A. thesis on Jones’s short stories, Richard Kermond’s “Evil and Suffering in the Short Stories of Edward P. Jones” (2010), a PhD dissertation on the rhetorical devices in his complete works, by Robert Lee Edwards, entitled “Revising a Tradition” (2020); and Jones figures in Kenton Ramsby’s The Geographies of African American Short Fiction (2022). However, no volume exclusively devoted to his short fiction has been published so far. In this special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English, scholars from America, Europe, Asia and Africa share the results of their attention to Jones’s distinctive voice and vision in his short fiction, in the aim of furthering the appreciation of Jones’s art by individuals like my friend as well as by critics of literature. The issue addresses the remark that “Nothing happens” by studying how Jones’s cycles and stories thematically and stylistically illustrate personal and historical change, and how Jones’s creative license enriches his work—while the effect of recurrences in forms, figures, and settings is explored too.

6Readers who “see the point” in Jones’s stories are affected by their special resonance. Jones writes about people and places like those he knew growing up—“I mean,” he said, “certainly, if I had been born in Chicago and all the people around me, the adults around me were born in Chicago as well, then I think the writing would have been a different sort of thing. But I grew up with these people [for whom] the South was still a very real place, even though they just visited once every year” (Personal interview). The stories are set in Washington D.C. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and center on African American Washingtonians, most of them originally from the South. The city in which the characters live, one of neighborhoods rather than monuments and museums, and the focus on day-to-day experience, create an intimacy with the text, so that the reader is sensitive to indications revealing changes in the setting and to what prompts changes in the characters’ feelings. And, as Neely Tucker has pointed out, Jones presents a complex world in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. The two cycles echo one another:

There are fourteen stories in Lost, ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are fourteen stories in Hagar’s, also ordered from the youngest to the oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on. (qtd. in Wood 51)

7This relatedness gives an idea of the changes in the fortunes of the characters. Moreover, Jones often “alternate[s] between back story and front story” (Interview by Graham 2008), delving into the misdeeds of the seemingly good and casting a gentler light on unsympathetic characters. As the “dear Jesus”-ing, sign-of-the-cross-making Agnes picks up blind Roxanne’s beer in “Blindsided,” she asks herself “who would know if she spit in the can” (312), for example, while Roxanne, who abandoned her daughter, realizes their inalienable bond and shares her certainty of it with the child. At other times, Jones digresses or effects deictic shifts to provide unexpected information—abrupt shifts beyond the story being narrated: “Georgia was one and a half years from marrying Alvin Deloach. . . . She was nearly twenty years from going to Israel with Cornelia and Lydia, who would not be a doctor but who would make more money than all her ancestors put together, all of them, all the way back to Eve” (“Common Law” 236-37). This, as Christopher Gonzalez notes, “broaden[s] the storyworld in which his characters reside, so that each individual story, while tightly yoked to each of the others, also pushes against and extends the spatial and temporal boundaries set by the story cycles in their entirety” (201). Transformative intertextuality takes other forms in Jones. To take one example, his haunting though simple style, integrating southern folk expressions, was inspired, he says, by the Bible, which does not lay stress on the enormity of the misfortunes that befall its figures: “I was moved by the poetry but it also occurred to me that the world of those people had come through clearly and movingly even though the various writers had told the Biblical stories in an almost reportorial fashion—no overwhelming, intrusive emotional insertions” (qtd. in Wood 29).

8Readers may trace even more changes and resemblances in Jones’s work as this issue begins on three of his uncollected early short stories, “Harvest” (1976), to which he has added a recollective note, “The Farmers Palace” (1981) and “Island” (1983). Only “Harvest” is partly set in Washington; but as in the later D.C. stories, the Washingtonian Jones, who has often acknowledged his debt to his mother as a writer, was trying to “remember the southern things [his] mother often talked about,” for he says, “My mother’s language, her Southern way of speaking, has always been a voice in my head” (Personal exchange). Their protagonists have all gone through a great change—that is often recounted in analepses—and are changed in the course of events in the stories. The stories bear rereading to appreciate the full background, as well as to immerse oneself in the rich details of the present of the diegesis, and in the savor of Jones’s language. As early as “The Farmers Palace,” notably, Jones established a difference between man’s insignificance in the open country and in the city: “He looked at his fields and the black birds flying over them and away into the sun. . . . Here was the only place where he had felt safely small. There had been nightmares for two nights after his return, dreams about being lost in that city” (41, in this issue). Already in Philadelphia, as later in Washington, D.C., Southern-born African Americans risk getting lost in the city, which is nevertheless a place of liberation, too. The protagonist of “Island” loses hope long before she reaches New York, but the narrator of “Harvest” suggests she has found herself in D.C.: “Perhaps too I now felt for the first time more powerful than [my father], belonging to myself alone, and with that there was probably no more need to hate him” (34, in this issue).

9The enormous changes in his fortune have not affected Jones’s simple personal style. He is affable and accessible when relating the facts of his life and career, as shown by the interview that Jones granted me in the summer of 2022. He went over his formative years, when, he says, he never gave fiction writing a serious thought, and delved into particulars of his short-story writing, teaching and beliefs. His humor comes through as he likens a writer’s voice to having a grandmother who loved blue, or writing with an ending firmly in mind to driving a car, albeit through detours, to a given destination.

10“Edward P. Jones, a Black Storytelling Demographer,” by Kenton Rambsy, is the first essay in this issue. Rambsy, who has produced a dataset and many publications on Jones, provides an idea of Jones’s compositional art, remarkable in short fiction by African Americans for the host of named characters moving through identified locales. “Jones is something of a demographer,” Rambsy argues, and “providing links between his two collections demonstrates a long-term commitment to his major and minor characters.” As Rambsy concentrates on stories tracking two protagonists through the two cycles, he suggests that Jones’s unusually frequent depictions of mobile black women are transformations of his experience and highlights the developments in character that Jones makes manifest, stressing Jones’s portrayal of redemptive change.

11Jones likes to stress that he places his characters in real places. Readers have felt that he sometimes endows these places with characteristics that may change the impact of the story. In “Creativity and Place in the Short Stories of Edward P. Jones,” Abd Alkareem Atteh shows the complexity of Jones’s world as real places, such as Washington D.C. or the South, may be transformed into liberating spaces of creativity and the imagination in both short story collections, and especially “in All Aunt Hagar’s Children . . . three stories: ‘Tapestry,’ ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children,’ and ‘A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru’ . . . explore the relationship between creativity and history.” These stories of creativity and imagination, Atteh holds, “present a space of hope, change and possibilities.” In “Edward P. Jones’s Mythopoesis: A Reading of Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children” Tanutrushna Panigrahi also considers that Jones creates a world where the specific locales are far from limiting. She sees them as part of a mythopoeic project: like Faulkner, Cheever, Anderson, Fitzgerald or Updike, Jones creates a world that transcends its boundaries: “Jones’s men and women . . . experience the highest forms of epiphanical moments that liberate them from the confinements of the moral and physical boundaries of Washington D.C.,” and his art transforms Washington D.C. into a largely symbolic space.

12Laura Dawkins explores Jones’s treatment of the changes wrought by trauma after children are exposed to violence in “‘The Curious Alphabet of Our Lives’: Transgenerational and Vicarious Childhood Trauma in Edward P. Jones’s ‘Spanish in the Morning’ and ‘Common Law.’” She brings into play the notions of vicarious, or secondary trauma, and of second generation “postmemory,” and links their symptoms to the fears of Blacks throughout the generations in America. She stresses Jones’s typical focus on the agency of family and community in healing them, though she notes his realistic “eschewing his familiar device of prolepsis in which he foretells the future lives of his characters,” suggestive of the likely perpetuation of trauma.

13Family and community are also central in Jones’s “sort of a detective story,” in which the narrator-detective investigates a murder. In “Detection in Jones’s ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children’: Stories, Escape and Discovery,” I consider Jones’s variations on the detective fiction genre, such as the introduction of the supernatural, and trace the narrator’s changes as regards his hometown and the people in it. Much of the humor in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” is complex, stemming from the perception of its narrator’s immaturity. In “Representing the Intolerable: Black Humor in Selected Stories from Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” Maryam Yusuf Magaji and Ignatius Chukwumah consider that the detective’s story, “A Rich Man,” and “Bad Neighbors” all contain another complex type of humor, and, after linking Jones to the tradition of ironists and black humorists, they analyze instances of dark humor in these stories, insisting on its capacity to point beyond what is shown to the ideal. They see Jones as limning “the malaise of modernity,” basing their investigation of this malaise on a comparison with the woes of “the modern subject sardonically and ironically presented in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock,” and suggest that for Jones, the tolerated and the intolerable are two sides of the same coin.

14In “Notes on Art as a Translator of Experience in Edward P. Jones’s Storytelling: From ‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons’ to ‘In the Blink of God’s Eye,’” Françoise Clary concentrates on community and how Jones effects the transformation of data into another’s experience, using the first short story of each collection as a basis for her study. Her notes will be of value when reading the whole of Jones’s oeuvre. Without a doubt, the impression of familiarity that one has with the situations and characters Jones portrays on reading the stories is the result of a cognitive growth testifying to his mastery of an art that combines truth and beauty.

15The three stories included here will no doubt be of interest to readers in the public at large as well as to scholars. The essays are a small contribution to the existing discussion on Jones’s themes of the city and nature, the family and community, capitalism and the urban poor, and on his treatment of the uncanny and the supernatural, humor and tragedy, the realistic and the oneiric—there is still much to discover in these and other aspects of his work. In addition to the works cited by each contributor, which include some information relating to Jones available on the web, the reader will find a bibliography compiled by Gérald Préher in the final pages of this issue, giving an idea of the scope that the interest in Jones’s stories by journalists and academics has taken. It is our hope that what remains to be explored will occur to the peruser of these pages—even if it is simply reading the works of Jones for the first time.