John Edgar Wideman And Modernity
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John Edgar Wideman and Modernity
Author: Michel Feith
language: en
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Release Date: 2024-01-12
The career of writer John Edgar Wideman has been the sort of success story on which America prides itself. Coming from an inner-city African American neighborhood, he studied at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Oxford; published his first novel at age twenty-six; won two PEN/Faulkner Awards, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant”; and has held several top teaching posts. But profound tragedy has also marked his life: both his brother and son received life sentences for murder, and a nephew was killed at home after a bar fight. His life thus illustrates how the strictures of “race” temper American notions of freedom and opportunity. Wideman’s engagement with race and identity has been nuanced and complex, taking the form of what Michel Feith sees as a critical dialogue with modernity–a moment in history which gave birth not only to the Enlightenment but also to American slavery and the conundrum of “race.” Feith argues that the key work in the Wideman oeuvre is The Cattle Killing (1996), his only “historical novel,” whose threads include the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, the 1856–57 Cattle Killing prophecy, which wreaked havoc among the Xhosa tribe of South Africa, and the contemporary situation of black ghettos in the United States. Unfolding within the early days of the American Republic, the novel offers a window through which all of Wideman’s works and their central concerns—ghettoization, imprisonment, familial relationships, emancipation, and the diasporic sense of history—can be understood. With clarity and theoretical sophistication, Feith offers provocative new readings of Wideman’s texts, from the “Homewood” books based on his youth in Pittsburgh to his haunting memoir Brothers and Keepers. In the “postmodern” era, Feith suggests, critics of modernity are not in short supply, but few have the depth, rigor, and thoughtfulness of John Edgar Wideman.
You Made Me Love You
Author: John Edgar Wideman
language: en
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Release Date: 2022-02-15
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).
American Histories
“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.