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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( W ) : Wideman, John Edgar
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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.
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From "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire — a young boy who was seen running from the flames. An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe" (San Francsisco Chronicle).
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A striking collection of works from authors both established and emerging, this is the first original anthology of African-American writing in over a decade. Featured contributors include: J. California Cooper, Marita Golden, Gloria Naylor, Darryl Pinckney, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Terry McMillan, and many others.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Award winning actor Clifton Davis reads the newest collection of stories by John Edgar Wideman, who has been called "the most gifted black novelist of his generation." In stories like All Stories Are True, Back Seat, and A Voice Foretold, Wideman depicts life in urban black America--a youth's first sexual experience, visiting a son or a brother in prison, or the thoughts of a newborn child as she is thrown to her death by her desparate preteen mother. Compassionate and expansive, Wideman reaches into the back alleys and prison yards of American culture to find truths we can all learn from.
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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.
As Wideman writes in his introduction to this edition, the three books “offer a continuous investigation, from many angles, not so much of a physical location, Homewood, . . . but of a culture, a way of seeing and being seen.” Three voices and three perspectives dominate the story narrated in Hiding Place: Bess, who has lost a son to the war, living a hermetic existence of Bruston Hill; tommy, who is fleeing the police for a murder charge he is not guilty of; and Clement, a simple boy who makes deliveries to Bess’s house.
Damballah is a powerful collection of interrelated stories spanning a century in Homewood. The tales celebrate a community of people who, in the face of crisis, need, and fear, uphold each other through grace, courage, and dignity.
Winner of the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and named as one of the fifteen best books of 1983 by the New York Times Book Review, Sent for You Yesterday traces, through its narrator, Doot, the intertwining lives through time of the inhabitants of Homewood-- Lucy, Brother Tate, Albert Wilkes, Carl French, and their ancestors and offspring--- from the blues-oriented 1920s to the drug-influenced 1970s.
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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 thorny relationships between genders, races, and friends, stories that break the rules and expose the turning points of life for what they really are.
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This is the only short story anthology to acknowledge the diversity of writers from the African Diaspora. The collection is comprehensive, laying open the fascinating tradition of Black life throughout the U.S., the Americas, and Europe. The very definition of "Black Diaspora" is embodied here with 36 English-speaking writers, and 34 writers translated into English.
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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?
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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.
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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.