Marriage and Family

One of the dominating themes throughout All Aunt Hagar's Children is the mutable and complex nature of the family unit, the ways that family comes to shape a person's life, and especially the rigors of marriage. In several of his stories, Jones examines the question of what constitutes "family," and explores the tensions between blood relations and what could be called "found family." In still others, Jones examines marriage: its pitfalls, the complexity of navigating the gender dynamics that undergird it, and its ability to help couples both endure and separate.

The idea of the family unit is often stretched in the stories of All Aunt Hagar's Children beyond the conventional domestic view so as to dig into the lives of the collection's subjects and examine the ways in which categories of family can be unconventional or shifting. In "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and...