A powerful selection of the best of John Edgar Wideman’s short
stories over his fifty-year career, representing the wide range of
his intellectual and artistic pursuits.
When John Edgar
Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019, he joined a list of
esteemed writers—from Eudora Welty to George Saunders—all of whom
are acknowledged masters of the short story. Wideman’s commitment
to short fiction has been lifelong, and here he gathers a
representative selection from throughout his career, stories that
challenge what defines, separates, and unites us; dare to push form
and defy convention; and, to quote Wideman, seek to “deconstruct
the given formulas of African American culture and life.”
Wideman’s stories
are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood, the
Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood, but they range far beyond
there, to the small western towns of Wyoming and historic
Philadelphia, the contemporary world and the ancient past. He
explores the interior lives of his characters, and the external
pressures that shape them. These stories are as intellectually
intricate as they are rich with the language and character. “John
Edgar Wideman’s short stories render an internal and external world
as vivid and intricate as Faulkner’s, as emotionally painful as
Baldwin’s, and as unique as his own streets and stoops of
Homewood,” wrote the PEN/Malamud Award selection committee.
Comprised of
thirty-five stories drawn from past collections (American
Histories, Briefs, God’s Gym, All Stories Are True, Fever, and
Damballah), and an introductory essay by the National Book
Critics Circle board member and scholar Walton Muyumba, this volume
of Wideman’s selected stories celebrates the lifelong significance
of this major American writer’s essential contribution to a
form—illuminating the ways that he has made it his own.