We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
TUESDAY
Edward P. Jones is a rock star. OK, maybe he doesn’t have a rock-star name like Chuck Palahniuk or get mad rock-star groupies like John Grisham (probably). But Jones, who was born in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Arlington, is one of the most decorated writers in the world. Tell me, what’s more hard-core than winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for your debut novel? After those hearty huzzahs for 2003’s The Known World, Jones didn’t go around smashing guitars or, uh, throwing inkwells. The couple of short stories he’s had published in the New Yorker in the past year reflect the same quiet, incisive character studies of hard-bitten black D.C. residents that earned him his fame. “Marie,” originally published in 1992 and anthologized in The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms, is a good introduction to Jones’ winning, easy style. The short story mostly takes place in a Social Security office as the title character, an 86-year-old woman living by herself at 12th and M Streets NW, waits futilely for an appointment. Jones adds gravity to Marie’s plight by introducing a backstory in which she shares her early memories of living in D.C. Along with “Marie,” the Paris anthology offers up dozens of other pieces published in the magazine since its inception in 1953, including stories by Raymond Carver and William Maxwell and poems by Philip Larkin and William S. Burroughs. But Jones rocks harder than all of them—and not just because they’re dead. Come watch Edward P. kick out the jams when he reads from the anthology at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 20, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Josh Levin)