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Critical Essays On John Edgar Wideman
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Book Synopsis Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman by : Bonnie TuSmith
Download or read book Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman written by Bonnie TuSmith and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is an indispensable study of Wideman's oeuvre, covering the full range of his career by addressing the key features of his fiction and nonfiction from 1967 to the present.The essays in this book reflect the most advanced thinking on Wideman's prolific, extraordinary art. The collection features at least one article on each major work and includes the voices of both well-established and emerging scholars. Though their critical perspectives are diverse, the contributors place Wideman squarely at the center of contemporary African American literature as an exemplar of postmodern approaches to literary art. Several position Wideman within the context of his predecessors-Wright, Baldwin, Ellison-and within a larger cultural context of music and collective history. The essays examine Wideman's complex style and his blending of African and Western cosmologies and aesthetics, the use of personal narrative, and his imaginative revisioning of forgotten historical events. These insightful analyses cover virtually every stage of Wideman's career and every genre in which he has written. A detailed bibliography of Wideman's work is also included"--From Amazon.co.
Book Synopsis Writing to Save a Life by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book Writing to Save a Life written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wideman "traces the life of the father of iconic civil rights martyr Emmett Till--a man who was executed by the Army ten years before Emmett's murder--presenting an ... exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable black intellectuals of our time"--Amazon.com.
Book Synopsis Brothers and Keepers by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book Brothers and Keepers written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Book Synopsis Philadelphia Fire by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book Philadelphia Fire written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by black liberation group Move. In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames. Award-winning author John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel. “Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Time) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philadelphia Fire is a masterful, culturally significant work that takes on a major historical event and takes us on a brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.
Book Synopsis Look for Me and I'll Be Gone by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book Look for Me and I'll Be Gone written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of the Year* From John Edgar Wideman, a modern “master of language” (The New York Times Book Review), 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. In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that—despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division—encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior. Never content merely to tell a story, Wideman seeks once again to create language that delivers passages like jazz solos, and virtuosic manipulations of time to entangle past and present. The story “Separation” begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather’s coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. “Atlanta Murders” starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin’s report on the 1979–1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia. Comprised of fictions of the highest caliber and relevancy by a writer whose imagination and intellect “prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul” (Entertainment Weekly), Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone will entrance and surprise committed Wideman fans and newcomers alike.
Book Synopsis Writing Blackness by : James W. Coleman
Download or read book Writing Blackness written by James W. Coleman and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most critically acclaimed yet least recognized contemporary writers, African American author John Edgar Wideman creates work often described as difficult, even unfathomable. In Writing Blackness, James Coleman examines Wideman's prolific body of work with the goal of making his often elusive imagery and dense style more accessible and thus broadening his readership. More so than for most writers, Coleman shows, Wideman's life has affected his writing. Born in 1941, Wideman grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb where he attended an integrated high school, starred on the basketball team, and was senior class president and valedictorian. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied creative writing and became an all--Ivy League basketball player. Winning a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Oxford, after which he returned to Penn and became its first black tenured professor. Wideman published his first novel, A Glance Away, at age twenty-six and by 1973 had published two more works of fiction. But for all this success, something began to wear on him. In 1973, his grandmother died, and after listening to family stories when he traveled home for the funeral, Wideman began to change his world view. Between 1973 and 1981 Wideman published nothing and immersed himself in African American culture, reading widely and -- even more important -- moving much closer to his family. Since 1981, Wideman has refocused his life and writing on blackness and published twelve experimental works, all very different from his earlier books. Coleman examines nearly all of Wideman's work, from A Glance Away (1967) to Fanon (2008). He shows how Wideman has developed a unique style that combines elements of fiction, biography, memoir, history, legend, folklore, waking life, and dream in innovative ways in an effort to grasp the meaning of blackness -- an effort that makes his writing challenging but that holds more than ample rewards for the perceptive reader. In Writing Blackness, Coleman demonstrates why Wideman ranks among the best of contemporary American writers.
Book Synopsis Sent for You Yesterday by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book Sent for You Yesterday written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1983 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Interpreter written by Alice Kaplan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-09-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home. One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today. When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. Alice Kaplan's towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France's most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person. In Kaplan's hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.
Book Synopsis American Histories by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book American Histories written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Hoop Roots written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, this book tells of the author's love for a game he can no longer play.
Book Synopsis You Made Me Love You by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book You Made Me Love You written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Fatheralong written by John Edgar Wideman and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Damballah written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the experiences of a Black family from just after the Civil War to the radical sixties.
Book Synopsis All Stories are True by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book All Stories are True written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1993 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set mainly in the Pittsburgh district of Homewood, these 10 stories depict African Americans from all walks of life--ancestors, family, and lovers caught in the vortex of American history and haunted by their own particular demons. "(Wideman is) one of our very finest writers, period".--New Republic.
Book Synopsis Understanding John Edgar Wideman by : D. Quentin Miller
Download or read book Understanding John Edgar Wideman written by D. Quentin Miller and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete overview of an innovative and analytical author who rose from poverty Among the many gifted African American authors who emerged in the 1970s and 80s, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most challenging and innovative. His analytical mind can turn almost any topic into an intellectual adventure, whether it is playground basketball, the blues, the prison experience, father-son relationships, or the stories he lived or heard growing up in the impoverished section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. In Understanding John Edgar Wideman, D. Quentin Miller offers a comprehensive overview of Wideman's writings, which range from the critically acclaimed books of the Homewood Trilogy to lesser known writings such as the early novels A Glance Away and The Lynchers. Notably Miller includes the first scholarly analysis of Writing to Save a Life, Wideman's recently published meditation on the military trial and execution of the father of civil rights martyr Emmett Till. In his fiction, nonfiction, and works that artfully combine both forms, Wideman has employed a multilayered and often difficult writing style in order to explore a wide range of topics. Miller tackles such topics as African American folk history, the intersection of personal and public history, the confluence of oral and written traditions, and the quest for meaning in nihilistic urban settings where black families struggle against crime, poverty, and despair. Miller also shows how Wideman's singular personal history is interwoven into his writings. His impressive accomplishments, including an Ivy League education and numerous literary honors, have come alongside family tragedies. By the time his sixth novel was published, both his brother and son were serving life sentences for murder, a source of anguish that he wrestled with in Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong. Wideman writes with such authority on so many subjects that readers frequently have no idea what to expect with a new publication. Understanding John Edgar Wideman is thus a necessary guide to a prolific, varied, and essential oeuvre.
Book Synopsis My Soul Has Grown Deep by : John Edgar Wideman
Download or read book My Soul Has Grown Deep written by John Edgar Wideman and published by One World/Ballantine. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Deepwill stand as an enduring monument to the depth and beauty of African-American literature.
Download or read book Two Cities written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first writer to win the PEN/Faulkner Award twice comes this redemptive, healing love story that celebrates the survival of an endangered urban black community and the ways in which people redeem themselves.
