Edward P. Jones by the Numbers

By Kenton Rambsy

His shortest story, “A Butterfly on F Street,” has about 1,600 words, and his longest, “Root Worker,” has about 14,600, more than nine times as many.

The word counts of Edward P. Jones’s two short story collections show his stories growing much longer from the first book to the second.

Across Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), Jones has published 28 stories, 14 in each collection, totaling about 233,700 words. The average Jones story runs about 8,300 words.

The 14 stories in Lost in the City total about 87,400 words and average about 6,200 words each, with “A Butterfly on F Street,” as the shortest at about 1,600 words, to the longest story, “The Store,” at about 11,300. Five stories run under 5,000 words: “A Butterfly on F Street,” “The First Day” (1,900), “An Orange Line Train to Ballston” (3,500), “Lost in the City” (3,600) and “A Dark Night” (4,400).

The 14 stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children are considerably longer than his first collection with a total about 146,300 words and average about 10,400 words each story. They range from “Resurrecting Methuselah,” at about 7,600 words, to the longest “Root Worker,” at about 14,600. “Resurrecting Methuselah” is longer than 9 of the 14 stories in the first collection, including “Gospel” (6,900) and “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed” (7,500).

Jones also links the two books in order, so each story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children connects to the story in the same position in Lost in the City. Miles, the barber who gives Betsy Ann her pigeons in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the first story of the first book, appears as a baby in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the first story of the second, and Penelope “Penny” Jenkins of “The Store” returns in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” the fifth story in each. Lost in the City moves from its youngest characters to its oldest, while several stories from All Aunt Hagar’s Children feature the geographic South to depict what ties several DC residents to the migration that brought their families to the District.

Read together, the word counts and the links between the books show Jones building one connected set of DC stories, compact in two short story collections.

 

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings