Most Popular Books by John Edgar Wideman

A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, this is the author''s seminal memoir about two brothers, one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. He recalls the capture of his younger brother Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system. A gripping, unsettling account, it weighs the bonds of blood, tenderness, and guilt that connect the author to his brother and measures the distance that lies between them.

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.

Story of Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past. Inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move.

"A rare triumph" (The New York Times Book Review), this powerful memoir about the divergent paths taken by two brothers is a classic work from one of the greatest figures in American literature: a reflection on John Edgar Wideman''s family and his brother''s incarceration--a classic that is as relevant now as when originally published in 1984. A "brave and brilliant" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, the classic John Edgar Wideman memoir, Brothers and Keepers, is a haunting portrait of two brothers--one an award-winning writer, the other a fugitive wanted for a robbery that resulted in a murder. Wideman recalls the capture of his younger brother, Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system. A gripping, unsettling account, Brothers and Keepers weighs the bonds of blood, affection, and guilt that connect Wideman and his brother and measures the distance that lies between them. "If you care at all about brotherhood and dignity...this is a must-read book" (The Denver Post). With a new afterword by his brother Robert Wideman, recently released after more than fifty years in prison.

When a man is murdered and he is unfairly accused, Tommy hides out with Mother Bess--a relative who is mean and mentally unbalanced--and together they wallow in trepidation and anger desperately trying to find the nerve to face the world.

By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

Traces the experiences of a Black family from just after the Civil War to the radical sixties.

From John Edgar Wideman, "a master who] boldly subverts what a short story can be" (Publishers Weekly) comes a stunning story collection that spans a range of topics from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell. Forty years after John Edgar Wideman''s first collection of stories was published, he continues to produce new stories of the highest caliber and relevancy. Here, in his sixth story collection, he revisits themes that have infused his work for the duration of his career: family, loss, the penal system, Pittsburgh, physical and emotional life, art, and memory. Stories include "Separation," which begins with a boy standing alone beside his grandfather''s coffin, progressing to a scene with the narrator''s grandmother paying the funeral director weekly installments for the price of the casket. "Arizona," which appeared in The New Yorker, is written in the form of a letter to singer Freddie Jackson, whose song "You Are My Lady," enters the story through a car radio--a car that conveys the narrator''s son and his lawyers to a prison cell in Arizona. "Atlanta Murders" contemplates James Baldwin''s Evidence of Things Not Seen, written about the Atlanta child murders from 1979 to 1981, beginning with a riff on a "why-did-the chicken-cross-the-road" joke that takes a dark turn. Never satisfied to simply tell a story--with writing that is "layered and interwoven...understanding that perspective is various, varied" (The New Statesman)--Wideman continues to push form, with stories within stories, sentences that rise like a jazz solo with every connecting clause, voices that reflect who he is and where he''s from, and an exploration of time that entangles past and present. Whether historical or contemporary, intimate or expansive, the stories here represent the most recent work of a treasured American writer whose innovation, imagination, and intellect "prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul" (Entertainment Weekly).

An award-winning writer traces the life of the father of iconic Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till--a man who was executed by the Army ten years before Emmett''s murder. An evocative and personal exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of our time. In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later he returned, dead; allegedly he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett''s story is known, there''s a dark side note that''s rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett''s father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman''s personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmett''s murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis''s execution, he couldn''t escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Wideman brings extraordinary insight and a haunting intimacy to this devastating story. An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, Writing to Save a Life is completely original in its delivery--an engaging and enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons. Wideman turns seventy-five this year, and he brings the force of his substantial intellect and experience to this beautiful, stirring book, his first nonfiction in fifteen years.

From the first writer to win the PEN/Faulkner Award twice comes this redemptive, healing love story that celebrates the survival of an endangered urban black community and the ways in which people redeem themselves.

Fifty-seven short stories drawn from past collections celebrate the lifelong significance of this major American writer''s essential contribution to a form--illuminating the ways that he has made it his own.

“A powerful assemblage of short stories exploring late-in-life angst through personal myth, cultural memory, and riffs on an empire scorched by its own hubris” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from award-winning author John Edgar Wideman—his first collection in more than a decade. “Race and its reverberations are at the core of this slim, powerful volume, a blend of fiction, memoir, and reimagined history, in which the boundaries between those forms are murky and ever shifting” (The Boston Globe). In this singular collection, John Edgar Wideman blends the personal, historical, and political to invent complex, charged stories about love, death, struggle, and what we owe each other. With characters ranging from everyday Americans to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Nat Turner, American Histories is a journey through time, experience, and the soul of our country. In “JB & FD,” Wideman reimagines conversations between John Brown, the antislavery crusader, and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator—conversations that produce a fantastical, rich correspondence that spans years and ideologies. “Maps and Ledgers” eavesdrops on a brother and sister today as they ponder their father’s killing of another man. “Williamsburg Bridge” sits inside a man sitting on a bridge who contemplates his life before he decides to jump. “My Dead” is a story about how the already-departed demand more time, more space in the lives of those who survive them. American Histories is “an important addition to Wideman’s body of writing and a remarkable demonstration of his ability to address social issues through a range of fictional forms and styles” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). An extended meditation on family, history, and loss, American Histories weaves together historical fact, philosophical wisdom, and deeply personal vignettes. This is Wideman at his best—emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating—an extraordinary collection by a master.

From “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman, a reissue of the revered trilogy that launched his career—two novels and story collection all set in Wideman’s own hometown. Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday provide a stunning introduction to the uncompromising work of John Edgar Wideman, whose literary achievements have inspired The New York Times to name him “one of America’s premier writers of fiction.” Damballah’s narratives examine the vexed history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood whose origins are rooted in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States of America. The novels Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday personalize and interrogate that history’s presence in the contemporary lives of Homewood people and all Americans. Deeply concerned that designations such as “economically oppressed” or “Black” continue to dismiss and marginalize rather than embrace communities like the one in which he was raised, John Edgar Wideman—employing words on the page as his weapon—has dedicated himself to recording the weight, beauty, complexity, and justice that he believes Homewood’s voices, stories, and lives have earned and deserve. In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman’s ongoing contribution by offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers.

Interviews with the author of The Homewood Trilogy, Brothers and Keepers, and Philadelphia Fire.

A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, this book tells of the author''s love for a game he can no longer play.

Collection of short stories by the author covering the past ten years of his writing.

With resonant artistry and unflagging directness, Wideman examines the tragedy of race and the gulf it cleaves between black fathers and black sons. He does so chiefly through the lens of his own relations with his remote father, producing a memoir that belongs alongside the classics of Richard Wright and Malcolm X.

“Master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman uses his unique generational position to explore what he calls the “slaveroad,” offering “a fresh perspective of slavery’s impact and a confirmation of Wideman’s exalted status in American letters” (New York magazine). John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad is a groundbreaking work of “bruising candor and obsessive originality” (The Wall Street Journal). For centuries, the buying and selling of human beings was legal, and millions of Africans were kidnapped then forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as slaves. The enduring legacies of this slave road traffic—denied, unacknowledged, misunderstood, repressed—continue to poison the experiences and journeys of all Americans. In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard,” William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.” “A blend of memoir, fiction, history” (The Millions), Slaveroad is a book that will inform, challenge, and surprise Wideman fans as well as newcomers to his writing.

Set mainly in the Pittsburgh district of Homewood, these 10 stories depict African Americans from all walks of life--ancestors, family, and lovers caught in the vortex of American history and haunted by their own particular demons. "(Wideman is) one of our very finest writers, period".--New Republic.

Contains brief biographical sketches and well-known and obscure works by African American authors from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Ida B. Wells, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

In God''s Gym, the celebrated author John Edgar Wideman offers stories that pulse with emotional electricity. The ten pieces here explore strength, both physical and spiritual. The collection opens with a man paying tribute to the quiet fortitude of his mother, a woman who "should wear a T-shirt: God''s Gym." In the stories that follow, Wideman delivers powerful riffs on family and fate, basketball and belief. His mesmerizing prose features guest appearances by cultural luminaries as diverse as the Harlem Globetrotters, Frantz Fanon, Thelonious Monk, and Marilyn Monroe. As always, Wideman astounds with writing that moves from the intimate to the political, from shock to transcendence.

A surrealistic novel on the black experience. The action is in the form of vignettes and ranges from cattle killing by the Xhosa in Africa, believing this will drive the whites away, to a black bishop in Philadelphia taking his flock out of the white man''s church.

In this compelling travel memoir, the celebrated novelist explores Martinique''s seductive natural beauty and culture, as well as its vexed history of colonial violence and racism.

A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the Black Panthers in the States. Wideman’s novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African American novelist,Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to the ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood and chases the meaning of Fanon’s legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.

Edgar Wideman''s The Homewood Books is so named because they share characters, events, and locales, these two novels-- Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday -- and one collection of short stories --Damballah-- are set in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where Wideman was raised.

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.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers.20 represents the best of the best—one story from each of the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and original characters, settings, and emotions, charting the evolution of the short story over the past two decades. One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has helped launch the careers of a score of previously "undiscovered" writers, many of whom have gone on to great critical success. Past Winners of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize: David Bosworth, Robley Wilson, Jonathan Penner, Randall Silvis, W. D. Wetherell, Rick DeMarinis, Ellen Hunnicutt, Reginald McKnight, Maya Sonenberg, Rick Hillis, Elizabeth Graver, Jane McCafferty, Stewart O''Nan, Jennifer Cornell, Geoffrey Becker, Edith Pearlman, Katherine Vaz, Barbara Croft, Lucy Honig, Adria Bernardi.

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.

BRIEFS is a groundbreaking new collection of "microstories" from celebrated author John Edgar Wideman, previous winner of both the Rea and O. Henry awards saluting mastery of the short story form. Here he has assembled a masterful collage that explodes our assumptions about the genre. Wideman unveils an utterly original voice and structure- hip-hop zen-where each story is a single breath, to be caught, held, shared and savored. A relief worker''s Sudan bulletin, a jogger''s bullet-dodging daydreams, your neighbor''s fears and fantasies, an absent mother''s regrets-Wideman''s storytellers are eavesdroppers and peeping Toms, diarists and haiku historians. The characters and compass points range from Darfur to Manhattan, from Pittsburgh to Paris, but thetruecoordinatesthese stories chart are the psychic and emotional fault lines beneath our common ground. BRIEFS is an unforgettable map of the lives we inherit, those we invent, and the worlds we wander between first and last loves.

The first ever collection of John Edgar Wideman’s most influential essays and articles, five decades of cultural and literary criticism that paint a vivid portrait of America’s changing landscape and chronicle the emergence and evolution of a major presence in fiction. John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country’s literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, in this first-time collection from his extensive body of long-form journalism and biographical essays, readers are offered a chance to see and judge for themselves how Wideman has proven himself to be a luminous witness of America’s history. This volume goes beyond mere compilation; its challenging, insightful critical essays tell the story of a nation in transition—from the shame of legalized human slavery, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of the Obama era, and beyond. Originally featured in publications such as Esquire, Vogue, and The New Yorker, these narratives explore the elusive cores of an American culture, politics, and identity. With his unique depictions of iconic figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Emmett Till, and Michael Jordan, and intimate questioning of his own life, Wideman shares his original views of the changing tides of an American experience.

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).

A l''âge de quatorze ans, John Edgar Wideman découvre dans la presse américaine une photo du visage mutilé d''Emmett Till. Tout comme Wideman, ce dernier est âgé de quatorze ans, et tout comme Wideman, c''est un Noir américain. Cette image ne cessera de le hanter. En 1955, Emmett Till prend le train à Chicago pour rendre visite à sa famille dans le Mississippi. Accusé d''avoir sifflé une femme blanche, l''adolescent noir est kidnappé et assassiné. Ses meurtriers, blancs, seront acquittés. Resurgit en effet durant leur procès le fantôme du père d''Emmett, Louis Till, enrôlé dans l''armée américaine à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et jugé puis exécuté pour viol en 1945. Tel père tel fils, considère le jury, aussi blanc que les accusés. Habité par ce fait divers qui a marqué l''Amérique, l''auteur décide d''enquêter sur les circonstances douteuses de cette exécution. Il en fait ressortir les zones d''ombre et tente de combler le silence de Louis Till. Faits historiques, éléments autobiographiques et fictifs s''entrelacent pour former un récit aussi personnel qu''actuel, auscultant une société américaine rongée par l''injustice et la violence.