American Histories

October 15, 2017

MacArthur Fellow, two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner, and two-time National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Wideman is a literary force not to be ignored. Here he offers new stories that sometimes introduce real-life characters as they walk the line between personal and historical. For instance, one story envisions a conversation between John Brown and Frederick Douglass, while in other stories the narrator contemplates his relationship with his father and with his late brother and uncle.

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Starred review from January 29, 2018
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.

February 1, 2018
In 1993, Wideman published a book called All Stories Are True, and this new collection represents both an affirmation of and a challenge to that claim.The book's provocations begin with "A Prefatory Note" addressed to an unnamed president of the United States, asking when, or if, slavery will ever end, even with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. ("Slavery as a social condition," the letter states, "did not disappear....Skin color continues to separate some of us into a category as unforgiving as the label property stamped on a person." The next story, "JB & FD," reimagines, often to startlingly persuasive effect, the real-life transactions between the 19th-century black author/activist Frederick Douglass and the militant white abolitionist John Brown, whose bloody scourge against slavery climaxed with the deadly 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. The voices of the two men, in correspondence and conversation, seem to blend in with each other even as they argue over tactics and ideology. Later in the book, Wideman (Writing to Save a Life, 2016, etc.) makes a bolder, riskier move by taking his own crack at the ill-fated insurgent slave Nat Turner's confessions. In between, there are stories, or "stories," such as "Maps and Ledgers," in which the narrator recalls how his father's murderous act upended his family's perilous sense of harmony; "My Dead," Wideman's grim, haunting tally of "a bad ten months" during which he lost "a brother [and] a niece," who joined other dead relatives from whom they received names and legacies; and "Williamsburg Bridge," a digressive, quasi-surreal tour de force peering into the crowded mind of a man who's both hesitant about and intent on diving into the East River. You can also find tips on storytelling ("Writing Teacher") and even a review of the 2010 South Korean movie thriller The Yellow Sea that morphs into a meditation on the 2009 film Precious. You might, in other words, find this collection to be all over the place, and yet all of these pieces are linked by astringent wit, audacious invention, and a dry sensibility whose owner has for decades wrestled with what he describes as "the puzzle of how and why and where and who we come from."Wideman's recent work strides into the gap between fiction and nonfiction as a means of disclosing hard, painful, and necessary truths.

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Starred review from February 1, 2018
In his 50-year literary career, Wideman (Writing to Save a Life, 2016) has tackled race, family, and art from nearly every imaginable angle. As in much of his previous work, his latest collection blurs the line between fact and fiction, form and function, and history and autobiography. Some stories test the relationship between a storyteller and his characters, while in others historical figures narrate. In JB & FD, a writer painstakingly imagines the interactions between abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass. In Nat Turner Confesses, an African American privileged with grad school training dives into the mind of the eponymous rebel-slave. Maps and Ledgers looks at complicated family histories. When a father, on his first day in a new teaching position, kills an old friend, Aunt C rescues him, and that's when the family's troubles really begin. Williamsburg Bridge is a darkly comic look at death and inspiration as a suicidal man sitting on the bridge attempts to explain what led him there. The book fittingly closes with Collage, a paean to artists Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose styles Wideman emulates to explore intuition and composition. Wideman's shape-shifting, lyrical narratives offer mesmerizing and challenging perspectives on the creative process and the black experience, decisively affirming his stature as a major voice in American literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)