Introduction

On my first reading of Edward P. Jones’s short stories, the enigmatic openings gripped me. For example, “Every now and again, as if on a whim, the federal government people would write to Marie Delaveaux Wilson in one of those white, stampless envelopes and tell her to come in to their place so they could take another look at her. They, the Social Security people, wrote to her in a foreign language that she had learned to translate over the years . . .” (“Marie” 229). I felt pleasure at Jone...