The College of Charleston will host a reading and lecture by novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward P. Jones on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 5:00 p.m. in the TD Arena. This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required. Watch a video from the event.

Jones’ second novel, The Known World, is The College Reads! 2011 book selection. Each year, The College Reads! engages and connects thousands of students, faculty and staff around a single book to promote the idea that liberally educated people read broadly and discuss with one another ideas arising from the books they share.

Using the form of a historical novel set in Virginia in the decade before the Civil War, Edward P. Jones’ The Known World examines the complicated lives of African Americans—those who were enslaved and those who were free—in a way that calls into question the process of drawing easy conclusions about race, class, and gender.

“The College Reads! Committee selected this book for a variety of reasons,” says Provost George Hynd. “Although this is a work of fiction, the book deals with race in complex ways and will challenge students to confront pre-existing ideas about race, slavery, and human relationships at a time when they also have opportunities to revisit the foundations of the Civil War through events marking the sesquicentennial in 2011.”

Published in 2003, The Known World won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004. In 2005, it won the International IMPACT Dublin Literary Award.

Edward P. Jones  sold his first story to Essence in 1975 at a particularly difficult time in his life—after his mother’s death and when he was between jobs and living in a city mission. His first book, Lost in the City, is a collection of short stories about the African-American working class in 20th-century Washington, D.C. Jones’s third book, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was published in 2006 and takes up the lives of ancillary characters in Lost in the City.. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine. In 2007, All Aunt Hagar’s Children was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

A research guide from the Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library can be found at: http://libguides.library.cofc.edu/theknownworld

For more information about The College Reads!, contact  Lynne Ford, Academic Affairs, 953-5527.