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 ...

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.

Wideman "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--presenting an ... exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of ...

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 ...

This memoir is the story of an American family. Wrestling himself free from racial ideology, Wideman engages his family, past and present, in order to understand who he is today and to heal familial wounds.

This is Wideman at his best—emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating—an extraordinary collection by a master.

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 ...

A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, this is the author's seminal memoir about two brothers, one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder.

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.

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, ...