Description

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Forty years after John Edgar Wideman’s first book of stories, comes this stunning collection that is vital reading for anyone interested in the state of America today. Its subjects range from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from distrust of authority to everyday grief, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell.

A boy stands alone in his grandmother’s house, unable to enter the room in which his grandfather’s coffin lies, afraid the dead man may speak, afraid he won’t speak. Freddie Jackson’s song ‘You Are My Lady’ plays on the car radio as a son is brought to a prison cell in Arizona. A narrator contemplates the Atlanta child murders from 1979.

Never satisfied to simply tell a story, Wideman continues to push form, with stories within stories, sentences that rise like a jazz solo with every connecting clause, voices that reflect who he is and where he’s from, and an exploration of time that entangles past and present. Whether historical or contemporary, intimate or expansive, the stories here represent a pioneering American writer whose innovation and imagination know no bounds.

Publisher Review

Wideman's stories have a wary, brooding spirit, a lonely intelligence. They carry a real but atrophied affection for America. He airs the problems of consciousness, including the fragile contingency of our existence -- Dwight Garner * * New York Times on You Made Me Love You * * Praise for American Histories: 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 * * 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 * * Spectator * * 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 * * 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 * * 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 * * Profound . . . The structure of his work plays like jazz, layered and interwoven . . . Wideman's courage, his gorgeous plain speaking, is triumphant * * 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 DIAZ Undoubtedly the foremost chronicler of the urban African-American experience. A master storyteller, Wideman is both a witness and a prophet -- CARYL PHILLIPS 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 * *