Lost in the City

Edward P. Jones sets the stories in this collection (and in his second, All Aunt Hagar's Children) in the streets and buildings of Washington, D.C., with an almost obsessive geographical exactitude, but the stories, for all their realism, have something of the quality of fables. Lives, in a dozen or two pages, have an arc in which a decade can slip by in a moment, in which good and bad deeds have good and bad consequences (not necessarily the ones they've earned). In just these two marvelous books (his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Known World, is set in antebellum Virginia), Jones has made himself the District's most essential writer.