John Edgar Wideman Books In Order

Homewood Books In Order

  1. Sent for You Yesterday (1981)
  2. Damballah (1984)
  3. Hiding Place (1984)

Novels

  1. A Glance Away (1967)
  2. The Lynchers (1986)
  3. Reuben (1987)
  4. Philadelphia Fire (1990)
  5. The Cattle Killing (1996)
  6. Two Cities (1998)
  7. Fanon (2008)
  8. Hurry Home (2010)

Omnibus

  1. Identities (1994)

Collections

  1. Fever (1989)
  2. The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992)
  3. All Stories Are True (1993)
  4. God’s Gym (2005)
  5. Briefs (2010)
  6. American Histories (2018)
  7. You Made Me Love You (2021)
  8. Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone (2021)

Anthologies edited

  1. Ancestral House (1998)
  2. My Soul Has Grown Deep (2001)
  3. 20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2001)

Non fiction

  1. Brothers and Keepers (1984)
  2. Fatheralong (1994)
  3. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman (1998)
  4. Chronicles of the Civil War (1999)
  5. Hoop Roots (2001)
  6. The Island Martinique (2003)
  7. Writing to Save a Life (2016)

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John Edgar Wideman Books Overview

Sent for You Yesterday

Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth Homewood, Pittsburgh Wideman creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, ‘he establishes aamythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology’ New York Times Book Review.

Damballah

This collection of interrelated stories spans the history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh community founded by a runaway slave. With stunning lyricism, Wideman sings of ‘dead children in garbage cans, of gospel and basketball, of lost gods and dead fathers’ John Leonard. It is a celebration of people who, in the face of crisis, uphold one another with grace, courage, and dignity.

Hiding Place

A man lay dead in a parking lot. Tommy didn’t kill him, but the police will shoot first and ask questions later. Mother Bess is kin, but she is a crazy, mean old lady hiding out high about the Homewood streets streets that have taken away everything she ever loved. Together, Tommy and Mother Bess are hiding, in anger and fear. Will they find the courage to come out of hiding?

The Lynchers

Almost 30 years before 9/11, John Edgar Wideman published his third novel, a revolutionary and controversial story about four African American men who hatch a terrorist plot to shake a complacent America to its foundations. They see their plan to lynch a white cop as the ultimate symbolic act of protest in a racist, hypocritical society mired in fundamental inequalities that contradict its ‘Home of the Free’ credo. Critic Saunders Redding raved, ‘It is all here…
the history of Negro America raised to the grandeur of superb fiction, as Tolstoy did it for the history of the Russian people in the Napoleonic era in War and Peace. I think The Lynchers is far and away the truest, the most moving, and the most brilliantly crafted novel of Negro life in almost a quarter of a century that is, since Ellison’s Invisible Man, which in some ways it surpas*ses.’

Reuben

Reuben is a small man who, for little reward, helps people in big trouble. It is when he takes on Kewansa to try and get her child back from a man who has murdered a white man just to see what it was like, that his world starts to fall apart.

Philadelphia Fire

Eleven people five of them children are killed in west Philadelphia when 6221 Osage Avenue is bombed out of existence. One small boy is seen to escape the fire. From his life of self exile on an island in the Aegean, Cudjoe mourns the child until it becomes an obsession, leading him home, forcing him to face up to his own profound alienation and to the wrenching realities of his native land. He searches for the boy and, as he does so, he searches out his own past. Reconstructing his life plunges him backwards into memories both personal and communal, forwards inch by inch into a city fast becoming a nightmare. ‘Wideman’s novel succeeds through raw emotion and a linguistic versatility…
Written in a sinewy language which also combines reportage, ‘Philadelphia Fire‘ operates as parable and social document’ ‘Irish Times’. ”Philadelphia Fire‘ is a welter of fine writing, sociological observation, polemical address and messianic prophecy…
A literary novel in the grand contemporary, postmodern, literary style’ ‘New Statesman & Society’. ‘Unquestionably the foremost chronicler of the urban African American experience. A master storyteller, Wideman is both a witness and a prophet’ Caryl Phillips.

The Cattle Killing

In plague ridden eighteenth century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing the Xhosa people’s ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination the novel expands its narrator’s search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.

Two Cities

A redemptive, healing novel, Two Cities brings to brilliant culmination the themes John Edgar Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. It is a story of bridges bridges spanning the rivers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, bridges arching over the rifts that have divided our communities, our country, our hearts. Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Citiesis a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.

Fanon

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.

Hurry Home

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.

Fever

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.

God’s Gym

God’s Gym is the first story collection in more than a decade from one of our most celebrated American authors. A two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. He was awarded the prestigious Rea Award for accomplishment in the short story form, and these electric, mesmerizing stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Esquire, Callalloo, and Fiction, as well as in The Best American Short Stories.
God’s Gym features stories that explore issues of strength and faith, fate and belief. In the first story, Wideman writes, ‘My mother believes in a god whose goodness would not permit him to inflict more troubles than a person can handle. A god of mercy and salvation. A sweaty, bleeding god presiding over a fitness class in which his chosen few punish their muscles. She should wear a T-shirt: God’s Gym.’ Here are stories that chart the thorn*y relationships between genders, races, and friends, stories that break the rules and expose the turning points of life for what they really are.

Briefs

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.

My Soul Has Grown Deep

In this vital and inspiring volume, John Edgar Wideman has brought together the first truly representative sampling of literature by African American writers in the early centuries of our history. Reaching across periods, styles, and regional borders, Wideman has selected twelve works of genius some of them celebrated literary icons, others neglected or forgotten masterpieces and reprinted them in their entirety. The result is a book as thrilling in its passion as it is vast in scope. Though these selections come from a range of genres verse, memoir, historical, and personal narrative, they are all, fundamentally, stories of strength and survival. Frederick Douglass’s frank narrative of escape from slavery and Paul Laurence Dunbar s classic verse take their place beside lesser known works like Nat Love s stirring account of life as a black cowboy, Ida B. Wells s haunting descriptions of lynchings, and the crisp, compelling adventures of Olaudah Equiano. Wideman prefaces each selection with an illuminating biographical essay. The fruit of a lifetime s devotion to the best American writing, My Soul Has Grown Deep will stand as an enduring monument to the depth and beauty of African American literature.

20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for ashort fiction, John Wideman has compiled an anthology featuring stories from each of the past winners.

Brothers and Keepers

A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman’s seminal memoir about two brothers one an award winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and 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, tenderness, and guilt that connect Wideman to his brother and measures the distance that lies between them.

Fatheralong

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.

Conversations with John Edgar Wideman

Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. ‘Writing for me is a way of opening up,’ he states in one of the interviews in this collection, ‘a way of sharing, a way of making sense of the world, and writing’s very appeal is that it gives me a kind of hands on way of coping with the very difficult business of living a life.’ Wideman shares the joy and pain of his life experience. The easy laughter accompanying many of these interviews shows that conversations with him can be intense and fun. This book spans thirty five years. Wideman discusses a wide variety of topics from postmodernism to genocide, from fatherhood to women’s basketball. One of the pleasures of encountering these conversations is the glimpse they give into the workshop of the writer’s mind. He is shown in the interviews to be very open about his artistic aims, techniques, and sources, whether talking about his Aunt May’s storytelling or about African spirituality. The earliest piece collected here is an interview based profile, ‘The Astonishing John Wideman.’ It appeared in Look magazine in 1963 and featured him as a ghetto raised basketball star who had turned Rhodes scholar. Wideman’s fulfillment of his early promise is now an established fact: He is an award winning novelist, a university professor, a social and cultural critic, a political activist, and a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow. To date, he is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed books, including The Homewood Trilogy, Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, Fever, Fatheralong, and The Cattle Killing. Bonnie TuSmith is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University.

Hoop Roots

Hoop Roots is John Edgar Wideman’s memoir of discovering the game that has been his singular passion for nearly fifty years. It is equally, inevitably, the story of the roots of black basketball in America a story inextricable from race, culture, love, and home. As a boy, Wideman lived in his grandparents worn but welcoming home in the ghettoized Homewood section of Pittsburgh. It was a world presided over by women, forever coddling, scolding, protective. One day John slipped away from their watchful gaze and escaped to a place where white factory workers shot hoops on their breaks. Then someone handed him a ball. That thrilling first shot was a turning point. Later he sneaked from his dying grandmother s bedside to the courts where other black boys gathered. Here he really learned the game the African American game, whose style and power would change him and our culture. With Du Bois s The Souls of Black Folk as his model, Wideman combines memoir with history, folklore, and commentary to create a magical evocation of his unique slice of American experience. He imagines the Harlem Globetrotters in 1927, on their way to the Illinois town where the only black resident will be lynched. A playground game in Greenwich Village conjures Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and the sources of black minstrelsy. African American language, culture, music, and sport brilliantly interweave in a lyrical narrative that glides from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, from defiant to celebratory. Like his previous memoirs, Wideman s Hoop Roots is both deeply personal and fiercely resonant.

The Island Martinique

In this compelling travel memoir, two time PEN/Faulkner Award winner John Edgar Wideman explores Martinique’s seductive natural beauty and culture, as well as its vexed history of colonial violence and racism. Attempting to decipher the strange, alluring mixture of African and European that is Creole, he and his French traveling companion develop a powerful attraction to one another which they find at once threatened and elevated by a third party the island itself. A rich intersection of place, history, and the intricacies of human relations, Wideman’s story gets deep into the Caribbean and close to the heart of the Creole experience.

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