Great Jones!

Now up at the Voice (that fun title, by the way, was not mine but the brainchild of the literary genius behind the Dizzies): my review of Edward P. Jones's latest story collection. All Aunt Hagar's Children is a book I think everyone must read, at least if you are at all serious about literature or about life; this guy is one of the great geniuses of our time, I find reading his stuff a quite extraordinary experience. It's only a handful of writers who give me quite this feeling of the humanity and warmth of the characters (even though many of these stories are quite bleak); I really felt as I was reading this the same thing that draws me back again and again to my particular can't-live-without-them favorites (Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, Barbara Trapido's novels, David Copperfield).