Conversations with John Edgar Wideman

Conversations with John Edgar Wideman PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578060535
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Interviews with the author of The Homewood Trilogy, Brothers and Keepers, and Philadelphia Fire.

Conversations with John Edgar Wideman

Conversations with John Edgar Wideman PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578060535
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interviews with the author of The Homewood Trilogy, Brothers and Keepers, and Philadelphia Fire.

Writing to Save a Life

Writing to Save a Life PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501147285
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
An award-winning writer 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. An evocative and personal exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of our time. In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later he returned, dead; allegedly he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett's story is known, there's a dark side note that's rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett's father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, 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 Emmett's 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, Wideman brings extraordinary insight and a haunting intimacy to this devastating story. An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, Writing to Save a Life is completely original in its delivery--an engaging and enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons. Wideman turns seventy-five this year, and he brings the force of his substantial intellect and experience to this beautiful, stirring book, his first nonfiction in fifteen years.

Philadelphia Fire

Philadelphia Fire PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982148853
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Brothers and Keepers

Brothers and Keepers PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982148764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
“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.

Sent for You Yesterday

Sent for You Yesterday PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395877296
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982148950
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
*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.

Two Cities

Two Cities PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618001859
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
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.

You Made Me Love You

You Made Me Love You PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982148918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Fifty-seven short stories drawn from past collections celebrate the lifelong significance of this major American writer's essential contribution to a form--illuminating the ways that he has made it his own.

American Histories

American Histories PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1786892073
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In this new short story collection, John Edgar Wideman blends the historical and the imaginary, the personal and the political, to invent complex, charged stories about love, death and struggle. With a cast of real and fictional characters as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Wideman’s own family, it is a journey through the soul of America. In ‘JB & FD’ Wideman imagines conversations between white anti-slavery crusader John Brown and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In ‘Williamsburg Bridge’ a man contemplates his life as he sits on the edge of the bridge, meaning to jump. In ‘Maps and Ledgers’ a brother and sister ponder their father’s killing of another man. In these and the other stories in this collection, Wideman navigates an extraordinary range of subject and tone. He delivers individual narratives both emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating, and an extended meditation on family, history and loss. American Histories demonstrates a master at his absolute best.

Hoop Roots

Hoop Roots PDF Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618257751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
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.