New Releases by John Edgar Wideman

Reuben is an aging, wizened, slightly humpbacked black man. He lives in an abandoned trailer so cluttered with the detritus of his sixty years that visitors can scarcely find him amid the litter. Yet Reuben is also intelligent-street smart and plain smart-kind, thoughtful and possessed of an extraordinarily sharp legal mind. As a lawyer, he is the go between for the poor black of Homewood who must deal with the authorities'' downtown. (Taken from inside front jacket).

Lucy and Carl struggle to prevent the extinction of the Black community of Homewood and to keep alive the musical heritage of the blues piano player, Albert Wilkes.

In 1970, The New York Times wrote, "Hurry Home is a dazzling display...we have nothing but admiration for Mr. Wideman''s talent." Wideman''s second novel is the powerful and remarkably prescient story of a highly educated, multiracial man''s struggle to find himself and understand his place in a country walled off by sharp racial and class divisions which seem to preempt the very possibility of his existence. Cecil Braithwaite works as a janitor while earning a law degree, yet discovers faithful adherence to the script promising the American Dream is not enough. He travels abroad, looking to Europe and Africa, but can''t escape the abiding sense of rootlessness, of being trapped in a halfway house of questions the world''s not yet ready or willing to answer. Wideman starkly portrays how difficult it is to shake free of the shackles one is born to, claim an identity that transgresses society''s most fundamental boundaries, and find one''s true Home.

Eddie Lawson returns to Pittsburgh, where his crippled mother''s poisonous anger drives him to the streets. With his friend, Brother, Eddie is forced to confront his fears of Bum''s Forest and the class alienation which controls his life.