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The Homewood Trilogy
John Edgar Wideman
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R564
R475
Discovery Miles 4 750
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"Master of language" (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman's
first-ever collection of his most revered works--two novels and
story collection all set in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood
where he grew up. Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You
Yesterday provide a stunning introduction to the uncompromising
work of John Edgar Wideman, whose literary achievements have
inspired The New York Times to name him "one of America's premier
writers of fiction." Damballah's narratives examine the vexed
history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood whose
origins are rooted in a time when slavery was still legal in the
United States of America. The novels Hiding Place and Sent for You
Yesterday personalize and interrogate that history's presence in
the contemporary lives of Homewood people and all Americans. Deeply
concerned that designations such as "economically oppressed" or
"Black" continue to dismiss and marginalize rather than embrace
communities like the one in which he was raised, John Edgar
Wideman--employing words on the page as his weapon--has dedicated
himself to recording the weight, beauty, complexity, and justice
that he believes Homewood's voices, stories, and lives have earned
and deserve. In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of
a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this
edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman's ongoing contribution by
offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers.
'This is truly inimitable storytelling' Observer '[A] master of
language' New York Times A boy stands alone, unable to enter the
room in which his grandfather's coffin lies. 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. Look For Me and I'll Be Gone is vital reading
for anyone interested in the state of America today. Historical and
contemporary, intimate and expansive, the stories here represent a
pioneering writer whose innovation, form and imagination know no
bounds.
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Black Boy (Paperback)
Richard Wright; Foreword by John Edgar Wideman; Afterword by Malcolm Wright
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R498
R383
Discovery Miles 3 830
Save R115 (23%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
When Emmett Till was murdered aged fourteen for allegedly whistling
at a white woman, photographs of his destroyed face became a
flashpoint in the civil rights movement. A decade earlier Emmett's
father, Louis, had also been killed - court-martialled and hanged.
Though the circumstances could hardly have been more different,
behind both deaths stood the same crime, of being black. In Writing
to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman, born the same year as Emmett
Till, investigates the tragic fates of father and son. Mixing
research, memoir and imagination, this book is an essential
commentary on racism in America - illuminating, humane and
profound.
These 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.
In 1985 police bombed a West Philadelphia row house. Eleven people
died and a fire started that destroyed sixty other houses. John
Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to
shocking life in this seminal novel. At the heart of Philadelphia
Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old
neighbourhood and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone
survivor of the event, a young boy seen running from the flames.
One of Wideman's most ambitious and celebrated works, Philadelphia
Fire is about race, life and survival in urban America.
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Fanon (Paperback)
John Edgar Wideman
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R455
R399
Discovery Miles 3 990
Save R56 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon
was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of
African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of
France during World War II but later against France in Algeria's
war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth,
published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation
movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin
America, the Black Panthers in the States.
Wideman's novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary
African American novelist, Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of
Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling
from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit,
part screenplay, part love story, Fanon introduces the French film
director Jean-Luc Godard to the ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood and
chases the meaning of Fanon's legacy through our violent, post-9/11
world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought
to rectify.
In God's Gym, the celebrated author John Edgar Wideman offers
stories that pulse with emotional electricity. The ten pieces here
explore strength, both physical and spiritual. The collection opens
with a man paying tribute to the quiet fortitude of his mother, a
woman who "should wear a T-shirt: God's Gym." In the stories that
follow, Wideman delivers powerful riffs on family and fate,
basketball and belief. His mesmerizing prose features guest
appearances by cultural luminaries as diverse as the Harlem
Globetrotters, Frantz Fanon, Thelonious Monk, and Marilyn Monroe.
As always, Wideman astounds with writing that moves from the
intimate to the political, from shock to transcendence.
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Two Cities (Paperback)
John Edgar Wideman
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R443
R391
Discovery Miles 3 910
Save R52 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A redemptive, healing novel, Two Cities brings to brilliant culmination the themes John Edgar Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. It is a story of bridges -- bridges spanning the rivers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, bridges arching over the rifts that have divided our communities, our country, our hearts. Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Citiesis a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.
Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir about
two brothers - one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive.
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, tenderness and guilt that connect him to his brother and
measures the distance that lies between them.
In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.
By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories
in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and
loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that
rests lightly on its carefully foundation.
The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to
encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction.
Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren,
Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks,
Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best
collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming
writers. 20 represents the best of the best-one story from each of
the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar
Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and
original characters, settings, and emotions, charting the evolution
of the short story over the past two decades. One of the most
prestigious awards of its kind, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has
helped launch the careers of a score of previously "undiscovered"
writers, many of whom have gone on to great critical success. Past
Winners of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize: David Bosworth, Robley
Wilson, Jonathan Penner, Randall Silvis, W. D. Wetherell, Rick
DeMarinis, Ellen Hunnicutt, Reginald McKnight, Maya Sonenberg, Rick
Hillis, Elizabeth Graver, Jane McCafferty, Stewart O'Nan, Jennifer
Cornell, Geoffrey Becker, Edith Pearlman, Katherine Vaz, Barbara
Croft, Lucy Honig, Adria Bernardi.
Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American
men's writing since the 1970s, this forceful collection illustrates
how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed,
challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing
and, with it, black male identity.
From the "John Henry Syndrome" -- a definition of black
masculinity based on brute strength or violence -- to the
submersion of black gay identity under equations of gay with white
and black with straight, the African-American male in literature
and drama has traditionally been characterized in ways that confine
and silence him. Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama
identifies the forces that limit black male discourse, including
traditions established by iconic African-American male authors such
as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. This
thoughtful volume also shows how contemporary black male authors
use their narratives to put forward new ways of being and knowing
that foster a more complete sense of self and more humane and open
ways of communicating with and relating to others.
In the work of Charles Johnson, Ernest Gaines, and August
Wilson, contributors find paths toward broader, less rigid ideas of
what black literature can be, what the connections among individual
and communal resistance can be, and how black men can transcend the
imprisoning models of hypermasculinity promoted by American
culture. Seeking greater spiritual connection with the past, John
Edgar Wideman returns to the folk rituals of his family, while
Melvin Dixon and Brent Wade reclaim African roots and
traditions.
Ishmael Reed struggles with a contemporary cultural oppression
that he seesas an insidious echo of slavery, while Clarence Major's
experimental writing suggests how black men might reclaim their own
voices in a culture that silences them.
Taking in a wide range of critical, theoretical, cultural,
gender, and sexual concerns, Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and
Drama provides provocative and sustaining new readings of both
established and relatively unknown writers.
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