American Histories
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wideman, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fatheralong, boldly subverts notions of what a short story can be in this wonderful collection. In "Williamsburg Bridge" a man plans his suicide from the bridge while considering the lives and deaths of others below him, as well as what has brought him to this point. "Writing Teacher" explores the obligations and feelings of a black professor toward his white fiction writing student after she submits a story about the plights of a young black woman. "JB & FD" imagines a conversation over many years between John Brown and Frederick Douglass; "Nat Turner Confesses" brings the young Nat to life as a boy determined to change his fate. In "Yellow Sea," a man watches the films Precious and The Yellow Sea and analyzes the characters and their brutal struggles on screen and brings them into his own world, offering advice and empathy. Each story feels new, challenging, and exhilarating, beguilingly combining American history with personal history.
