JOE JJONES is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of the lives gathered around Jessie's Café, “a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan.” Jessie, “thin stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine,” inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family family of char-acters: Louise, the cook and vortex, “sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat”; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday.

 

ANNE LAMOTT is the best-selling author of Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, and most recently Blue Shoe. Her column in Salon magazine was voted the Best of the Wed by Newsweek magazine. She lives in Northern California with her son, Sam.