About this item
In a new short story collection, John Edgar Wideman - the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life - explores subjects from the historical to the imagined, with a cast of fictional and real-life characters as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Jean Michael Basquiat, and his own family.John Edgar Wideman, lauded throughout his career, is a master at many forms. His latest offering, a collection of complex, charged stories, is a stunning marriage of the personal and historical. "JB & FD" re-imagines conversations between John Brown, the White antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist and orator. "Maps and Ledgers" examines a painful incident in the narrator's childhood and his relationship with his father. "Williamsburg Bridge" follows a man contemplating suicide. "My Dead" considers the narrator's departed brother and uncle. These stories are spellbinding narrative reflections on abolitionists and artists, fathers and sons, the bonds of family and the pull of memory. Wideman's fiction challenges the boundaries of the form. His stories operate on many levels, weaving together historical fact, imagined conversation, philosophical kernels, and deeply personal vignettes. As a whole, American Histories amounts to more than the sum of its parts, an extended meditation on family, history, and loss. This is Wideman at his best, most emotionally precise, and most intellectually stimulating.
About the Author
A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000 he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal. In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu. com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award. His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England) , graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
