With “A New Man,” there was a story to follow up with. There is not (as yet) a follow-up story to assuage my fears. When a teenager goes off with some shady young men in Danielle Evans’s “Virgins” and does not return by the story’s end, all I could do is imagine the million horrible things that could have have happened to her. I’d been shaken by the disappearance of a young girl in a story before. should, in small and large ways, be connected with all the others.” If I do a third book of stories, I hope to do southern ones and the people in them will be connected with those in the first two books of stories. In an interview on the Politics & Prose website, Jones said, “The new stories ( All Aunt Hagar’s Children) go back to many characters who lived in the first book. I didn’t want to turn off the lights and lie in darkness, wondering how that poor girl had fared alone in a world as brutal as ours. Some of the Cunninghams’ despair radiated off the page and into me. To be moved is one of the reasons why I read. Maybe because it was late at night the first time I read “A New Man,” but the story left me unusually shaken. I’ve turned to Jones’s sentences from time to time in an attempt to establish that feeling in my work. His expansive sentences give the impression of a world alive, a world in motion. Since then I’ve read through his work, chasing that feeling. I read the title story and felt a swirling in my brain as if new parts of it were being brought to life. I began reading Jones by dipping in and out of his second collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Soon Jones writes that it’s “a little more than a year and a half after their daughter disappeared.” Finally it becomes “nearly seven years after Elaine Cunningham disappeared.” The pages dwindled and long before the last sentence, I knew we’d never see Elaine again. She’s gone for twenty-four hours and then forty-eight. Jones’s collection Lost in the City, betting on a return. I turned the pages of “A New Man,” from Edward P. Woodrow and Rita Cunningham’s fifteen-year-old daughter Elaine left home after arguing with her father about the boys she entertained in the house while her parents were away.
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