Ten Washington D.C. books that aren’t about politicians

Charlotte Taylor Fryar is a writer, historian, educator, and herbalist. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Glen Echo, Maryland, less than seven hundred feet from the banks of the Potomac River.

Her first book, Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River, is an essay collection exploring the natural history & racial history of Washington, D.C.’s waterways.

At Lit Hub Fryar tagged ten Washington D.C. books that aren’t about politicians. One entry on the list:

Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City

Edward P. Jones’ Lost in the City is the wellspring of D.C.’s literary landscape, capturing the lives of Black Washingtonians with exacting empathy and geographical precision. In fourteen loosely linked stories, Jones’ characters—largely Black working-class women and children—traverse the city grid, becoming so rooted within D.C. that their lives become maps.

Across Shaw and Columbia Heights, Anacostia and H Street, each story unfolds into the next to form an atlas of a changing D.C., one where white folks now live east of 14th Street. Inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jones describes his version of D.C., as the capital of “the ‘unfree world,’ [where] black human beings lived full and valued lives, lives that had all the messiness and grandness of white life in small, nowhere towns.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue