Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very honored to have as my guest, Edward P. Jones, the author most recently

of All Aunt Hager's Children.

It's a book of short stories published by Amistead.

He's the author as well of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World,

and a previous first book of stories called Lost in the City.

Now, to my surprise, as I was reading all Aunt Hager's children,

I started to recognize characters,

half situations, bits and pieces of incident from the earlier book.

And so this book, while it can be read with great enjoyment by someone unfamiliar with any of the earlier fiction by my guest

is fascinatingly full of the ghosts, the presences of other characters, major and minor,

from earlier stories at later times in their life, at earlier times in their life.

And so that feeling of putting together a kind of evanescent sense of the ongoingness of this community

is a very powerfully haunting one.

Tell me, had you always known that you'd be talking more about your characters from your

first book?

No, when I finished, when I finished Lost in the City in 91, and put down the last period,

...