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.

Wideman "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--presenting an ... exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable black intellectuals of our time"--Amazon.com.

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

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

"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.".

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.

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

“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.

By the author of Brothers and Keepers. This memoir is the story of an American family. Wrestling himself free from racial ideology, Wideman engages his family, past and present, in order to understand who he is today and to heal familial wounds.

*A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of the Year* From John Edgar Wideman, a modern “master of language” (The New York Times Book Review), 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. In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that—despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division—encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior. Never content merely to tell a story, Wideman seeks once again to create language that delivers passages like jazz solos, and virtuosic manipulations of time to entangle past and present. The story “Separation” begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather’s coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. “Atlanta Murders” starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin’s report on the 1979–1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia. Comprised of fictions of the highest caliber and relevancy by a writer whose imagination and intellect “prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul” (Entertainment Weekly), Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone will entrance and surprise committed Wideman fans and newcomers alike.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. “A towering figure in American literature.” —The Nation 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.

“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.

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).