John Edgar Wideman
Author
Language
English
Description
"In this singular collection, John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life, 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. "JB & FD" reimagines conversations between...
5) Fanon
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
Pub. Date
2008.
Language
English
Description
Psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925?1961) fought to free Algeria from French rule, and wrote several key texts on colonialism.
Wideman's fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoir to evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of The Wretched of the Earth. A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In The Louis Till File, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman's personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmetts murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis's execution, he couldn't escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers,...
7) God's gym
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
Pub. Date
2005.
Language
English
Description
In God's Gym, the celebrated author John Edgar Wideman offers stories that pulse with emotional electricity. The ten pieces here explore strength, both physical and spiritual. The collection opens with a man paying tribute to the quiet fortitude of his mother, a woman who "should wear a T-shirt: God's Gym." In the stories that follow, Wideman delivers powerful riffs on family and fate, basketball and belief. His mesmerizing prose features guest appearances...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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
...Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
Pub. Date
2001.
Language
English
Description
"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." "Combining memoir with history, folklore, and commentary, Wideman creates a magical evocation of his unique slice of American experience. He imagines the Harlem Globetrotters in 1927,...
Author
Publisher
Holt
Pub. Date
[1990]
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
Pub. Date
1996.
Language
English
Description
A surrealistic novel on the black experience. The action is in the form of vignettes and ranges from cattle killing by the Xhosa in Africa, believing this will drive the whites away, to a black bishop in Philadelphia taking his flock out of the white man's church.
Author
Publisher
Scribner
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman's ongoing contribution by offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers."--
18) Two cities
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin
Pub. Date
1998.
Language
English
Description
A novel on the black ghetto in Pittsburgh featuring Kassima, a woman whose husband died of aids and whose two sons were killed in street-gang violence. Out of loneliness she takes in a man who is a photographer and the novel describes the relationship that develops.
19) Hurry home
Author
Publisher
Harcourt, Brace & World
Pub. Date
[1970]
Language
English
Description
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...
20) Reuben
Author
Publisher
H. Holt
Pub. Date
[1987]
Language
English
Description
Reuben is an aging, wizened, slightly humpbacked black man. He lives in an abandoned trailer so cluttered with the detritus of his sixty years that visitors can scarcely find him amid the litter. Yet Reuben is also intelligent-street smart and plain smart-kind, thoughtful and possessed of an extraordinarily sharp legal mind. As a lawyer, he is the go between for the poor black of Homewood who must deal with the authorities' downtown. (Taken from inside...