Description
Book SynopsisThese stories offer spellbinding reflections on abolitionists and artists, fathers and sons, the bonds of family and the pull of memory. A re-imagined conversation takes place between white anti-slavery crusader John Brown and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A man sits on the edge of Williamsburg Bridge, contemplating suicide. The author considers the deaths of his brother, uncle, mother and niece.
John Edgar Wideman's fiction challenges the boundaries of the form. Emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating, this is Wideman at his best.
Trade ReviewLaced together, the stories in
American Histories read like an immense jazz riff . . . The acutely immersive world of
American Histories is irresistible, and these profoundly moving stories will haunt you long after you've finished reading -- Colin Grant * * Guardian * *
Wideman's rage against American injustice and racial prejudice burns magma-hot in his latest short stories . . .
Immensely powerful . . . Challenging, animating, enlivening and electrifying; it does what literature should do. It's a bruising experience that leaves you feeling vulnerable and excited and alive
-- Niall Griffiths * * Spectator * *
Wideman is a writer who excels at dramatising African American sensibilities and this collection typically addresses issues of race, injustice and inequality with power and potency . . . This is published alongside Wideman's earlier novels and is a gem for anyone yet to discover his work -- Anita Sethi * * Observer * *
With the scrupulous intelligence and meditative intensity that define all this author's work, the stories move from subjects like the Civil War and Nat Turner's rebellion to Mr. Wideman's family's tribulations, the two threads twining so intricately that they're impossible to separate . . . John Edgar Wideman's stories show he is a master of modernist collage * * Wall Street Journal * *
Wherever we're going with him, we're going to engage with America's unhealed wounds of slavery and racism . . . Wideman's stories range widely over experiences from slavery to the present day . . . All are illumined by a searching intelligence and a willingness to test the boundaries of the short story form * * New York Times * *
Profound . . . The structure of his work plays like jazz, layered and interwoven . . . Wideman's courage, his gorgeous plain speaking, is triumphant; it is a courage which almost allows the reader to believe that language can conquer despair, though despair is always evident . . . As Wideman has shown in book after book, it is the imagination that can allow a space in which a new understanding of all our stories may be forged - and where a more just future may be created * * New Statesman * *
Wideman is one of the nation's literary treasures, and his contribution is a dazzling, delirious achievement: as his narrator, perched on the edge of the Williamsburg Bridge, prepares for suicide, he delivers a
cri de coeur that ranges from Sonny Rollins to the Yalu River and becomes nothing less than a meditation on the extraordinary resilience of ordinary black lives in the American Century -- Junot Díaz
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 . . . Lucid and strong . . . Arresting * * Boston Globe * *
Strides into the gap between fiction and nonfiction as a means of disclosing hard, painful, and necessary truths * * Kirkus Reviews (starred) * *
Wideman . . . boldly subverts notions of what a short story can be in this wonderful collection . . . Each story feels new, challenging and exhilarating, beguilingly combining American history with personal history * * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * *
