The mythos of Edward P. Jones is about private creation. For 10 years after the publication of his first collection of stories, “Lost in the City,” little was heard from him. But in 2002 his agent learned that Mr. Jones had written a novel and another story collection. The novel, “The Known World,” was universally acclaimed as a real addition to American literature. It is followed now by the story collection, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” (Amistad Press, 400 pages, $25.95).

These 14 new stories reflect the 14 stories from Mr. Jones’s 1992 collection. Minor characters have now become protagonists; a young gun is now an ex-con; a grown man has become a foundling. Each story takes place in or leads back to Washington, D.C., and the reader wonders if Mr. Jones is creating a private Dublin, or a Winesburg, Ohio. Yet he does more; rather than describing Washington at a single moment in its history, he traces Washington’s southern roots. His female characters link the past to the present; their old superstitions and “mother wit” prove as compelling in the face of contemporary violence and drugs as they do in more historical stories of the backwoods.

On page one of this collection, a woman waits on her porch with a knife and a pistol:

That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown.

The “wolves” appear in many forms throughout this collection: as gunmen, as witches, as the devil himself, who wears a purple tie. But though Mr. Jones has this fantastical streak, he can also write about quotidian folly with exceptional taste and skill.

Still, it is the slightly magical side of Mr. Jones’s work that makes an impression. “The Root Worker” tells the tale of a successful young physician, Glynnis, whose periodically demented mother is cured by a root worker, a practitioner of voodoo. Glynnis herself, inspecting the root worker’s collection of medicines, fears that they might kill her. Her fear itself is at once a species of tradition, and also sarcastic and modern: “D.C. Physician, A Credit to Her Race, Dies in Mishap at Crone’s House,” as she imagines the headline.

Mr. Jones, whose stories can be conventionally magical in their wispy, open endings — ending mid-coin toss, for example — can do more than most short story writers: He actually supposes that magic works. In “The Root Worker,” Glynnis quietly accepts and then converts to the practice of voodoo.

This is not magical realism; it is simply magic. Voodoo does not figure too largely in Mr. Jones’s private fictional universe, but openness to such things does. His women, in particular, express leadership through eccentricity. His men are relatively feckless. “Men don’t make the best conjurers,” explains the root worker’s grandson. In “Spanish in the Morning,” one mother, who learned Spanish in school, insists on speaking it every morning, although no one in her family can understand it.This type of idée fixe means survival, in Mr. Jones’s world. Magic and mystery also become the tools of mothering: In the title story, three concerned mothers ask a prodigal boy out of the army to investigate a local murder. And when he discovers that the betrayed wife did it, he assumes that the mothers wanted to teach him a lesson.

Mothers are Mr. Jones’s muse. His male characters are never deficient. But women, particularly wise women, elbow their way into the reader’s lasting memory. The relationship between the author and these mothers gives the fiction its distinctive privacy.

Mr. Jones’s compatibility with the taste of the Oprah crowd — something the designers at Amistad Press have visibly addressed — is in fact one of the nicest things about his writing. The four corners of Mr. Jones’s map could be named superstition, mothers, tragedy, and goodness. The goodness is in the flavor of the writing itself; it can be called the honest writer, or the unassuming literary phenomenon, or the good son.