John Edgar Wideman

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).

Look For Me and I'll Be Gone

A powerful selection of the best of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories over his fifty-year career, representing the wide range of his intellectual and artistic pursuits. When John Edgar Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019, he joined a list of esteemed writers—from Eudora Welty to George Saunders—all of whom are acknowledged masters of the short story. Wideman’s commitment to short fiction has been lifelong, and here he gathers a representative selection from throughout his career, stories that challenge what defines, separates, and unites us; dare to push form and defy convention; and, to quote Wideman, seek to “deconstruct the given formulas of African American culture and life.” Wideman’s stories are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood, but they range far beyond there, to the small western towns of Wyoming and historic Philadelphia, the contemporary world and the ancient past. He explores the interior lives of his characters, and the external pressures that shape them. These stories are as intellectually intricate as they are rich with the language and character. “John Edgar Wideman’s short stories render an internal and external world as vivid and intricate as Faulkner’s, as emotionally painful as Baldwin’s, and as unique as his own streets and stoops of Homewood,” wrote the PEN/Malamud Award selection committee. Comprised of thirty-five stories drawn from past collections (American Histories, Briefs, God’s Gym, All Stories Are True, Fever, and Damballah), and an introductory essay by the National Book Critics Circle board member and scholar Walton Muyumba, this volume of Wideman’s selected stories celebrates the lifelong significance of this major American writer’s essential contribution to a form—illuminating the ways that he has made it his own.

Selected Stories, 1981-2018

You Made Me Love You

When Emmett Till was murdered aged fourteen for allegedly whistling at a white woman, photographs of his destroyed face became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. A decade earlier Emmett’s father, Louis, had also been killed – court-martialled and hanged. Though the circumstances could hardly have been more different, behind both deaths stood the same crime, of being black. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman, born the same year as Emmett Till, investigates the tragic fates of father and son. Mixing research, memoir and imagination, this book is an essential commentary on racism in America – illuminating, humane and profound.

Writing to Save a Life

Homewood Trilogy

“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.

A Memoir

Brothers and Keepers

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

Sent for You Yesterday

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

Damballah

A collection of stories about African Americans from all walks of life who reside in Homewood, a black section of Pittsburgh - stories about ancestors, family and lovers caught up in American history and haunted by their particular demons.

The Stories of John Edgar Wideman

All Stories are True

At once personal and political, this novel about being black and male in white America depicts an unyielding core of individual resistance and demonstrates with tragic immediacy how America's mixed signals foster false hopes. Reprint.

Philadelphia Fire

"Homewood was to be a place in his fiction but also more than that, a metaphor for the African American experience".

The Homewood Books

Stories

God's Gym

A collection of short stories follows a young woman jogger into an erotic fantasy, recounts an English professor's attempt to deconstruct his life, and records a Black musician's remembrances of his grandmother

Twelve Stories

Fever

In this new short story collection, John Edgar Wideman blends the historical and the imaginary, the personal and the political, to invent complex, charged stories about love, death and struggle. With a cast of real and fictional characters as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Wideman's own family, it is a journey through the soul of America.In 'JB & FD' Wideman imagines conversations between white anti-slavery crusader John Brown and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 'Williamsburg Bridge' a man contemplates his life as he sits on the edge of the bridge, meaning to jump. In 'Maps and Ledgers' a brother and sister ponder their father's killing of another man.In these and the other stories in this collection, Wideman navigates an extraordinary range of subject and tone. He delivers individual narratives both emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating, and an extended meditation on family, history and loss. American Histories demonstrates a master at his absolute best.

American Hi

A powerful and “stunning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) selection of the best of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories over his fifty-year career, representing the wide range of his intellectual and artistic pursuits. When John Edgar Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019, he joined a list of esteemed writers—from Eudora Welty to George Saunders—all of whom are acknowledged masters of the short story. Wideman’s commitment to short fiction has been lifelong, and here he gathers a representative selection from throughout his career, stories that “have a wary, brooding spirit, a lonely intelligence…[and] air the problem of consciousness, including the fragile contingency of our existence” (The New York Times). Wideman’s stories are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood, but they range far beyond there, to the small western towns of Wyoming and historic Philadelphia, the contemporary world and the ancient past. He explores the interior lives of his characters, and the external pressures that shape them. These stories are as intellectually intricate as they are rich with the language and character. “Wideman has been compared to William Faulkner and James Baldwin…[these] prove that he is every bit as masterful a cartographer of the American spirit as his forebears" (Esquire). Comprised of thirty-five stories drawn from past collections (American Histories, Briefs, God’s Gym, All Stories Are True, Fever, and Damballah), and an introductory essay by the National Book Critics Circle board member and scholar Walton Muyumba, this volume of Wideman’s selected stories celebrates the lifelong significance of this major American writer’s essential contribution to a form—illuminating the ways that he has made it his own. “If there were any doubts Wideman belongs to the American canon, this puts them to bed” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

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.

Hurry Home

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.

The Cattle Killing

A man running from his shattered life hides out with a crazy, half-dead, mean old lady; eventually these two failures recall what they have lost and finally find the courage to come out of hiding.

John Edgar Wideman

About

Books

Join the club