The Known World

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	In transit
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	Due 05-19-2025
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Jones, Edward P.	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2025
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Jones, Edward P.	4-week checkout	Due 05-15-2025
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Jones, Edward P.	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2025

The known world (novel) -- P.S.: An interview with Edward P. Jones -- "The known world" dramatis personae -- "A rich man" (short story.).
When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

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Difficult, but important book... submitted by ravsara on July 10, 2014, 8:58pm This book is beautifully written, and incredibly complex. It dealt with aspects of slavery that I had not anticipated and that were deeply unsettling. Because of its moral complexities, I found this to be a difficult book to love. But I am glad that I read it. Edward P. Jones is truly a gifted writer.

Slavery and Freed Black People in VA submitted by sdunav on July 18, 2014, 2:10pm Fascinating historic fiction, set mostly in the decade before the Civil War in a rural part of Virginia. The vignettes in the book all revolve around a group of Black freedmen (and women), the slaves they own, and their white neighbors and their slaves.

The writing is beautiful - elegant and moving, and it really pulls you into that "Known World" - a pretty socially and geographically circumscribed area. Bang on for "sense of place", in other words.

For me, it was hard to get into the story at first because it was disjointed in time - it jumps from a character's childhood, to his funeral, to his manumission - and there were so many characters. But about halfway through, it became terribly compelling. Big thumbs up, I think it deserved the Pulitzer Prize, AND it was beautiful, shocking, moving, and all that.

Not a fan submitted by EJZ on July 21, 2018, 10:19am This book just does not read well. Each sentence it seems starts with a new character, goes on to explain how that character was meeting some other new character on the road, and years from now the first character would find out on their deathbed from a third new character that they were actually the brother to that second character and isn't it sad how they only met on the road that one time.

Seriously, it got old rather quick. By introducing so many characters of trivial value so early in the book, the novel becomes about nobody in particular, just a collection of dates, names, and circumstances. The main thread is too easily lost.