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 John Brown, the antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator, conversations that belie the myth of race and produce a fantastical, ethically 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.
Navigating an extraordinary range of subject and tone, Wideman challenges the boundaries of traditional forms, and delivers unforgettable, immersive narratives that touch the very core of what it means to be alive. An extended meditation on family, history, and loss, American Histories weaves together historical fact, philosophical wisdom, and deeply personal vignettes. More than the sum of its parts, this is Wideman at his best—emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating—an extraordinary collection by a master.
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“Narrator Dion Graham so closely ties his pacing and tone to MacArthur fellow John Edgar Wideman’s ideas and variety of narrative structures in these essays and stories that he seems to become the writer speaking directly to the listener. The collection itself reaches broadly from the autobiographical and personal to the scholarly and to riffs on language itself, giving Graham an enormous range of opportunities to create character voices for men, women, youth, and the elderly; pronounce rhythmic passages with a full measure of energizing beats; and employ phrasing that echoes Wideman’s delight in the power of word repetition, alliteration, and occasional onomatopoeia…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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