A review by mobullock
Lost in the City - 20th Anniversary Edition: Stories by Edward P. Jones

emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Jones’s prose is so beautifully spare and evocative and the quality of his writing has a lucid tenderness to it. He handles the lives of his characters with a firm and honest but deeply careful hand. He creates a rich, complex, fully imagined world with each story and each moment he constructs and arranges in the sequence of his characters’ lives is organic and earned and authentic to how a life would read if it to be captured on paper as it was unfolding in real time.  While the nature of his characters’ lives and outcomes were often lamentable and melancholic, it is how astoundingly human they remained in every moment, that gave each of them, even the ones we might feel inclined to scorn owing to their incontrovertibly repugnant behavior, a dimension of heroism. Though Jones is unsparing in meting out their fates, he is not without compassion and his writing gives these lives the respect and consideration the those who love such lives in our world are often not afforded. I am intemperate in my love for this collection of stories.