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	John Edgar Wideman was the Second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship?
	Widemans' Cousin, Albert French, wrote a wonderful book; Billy

Fanon
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Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 10 edition (February 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618942637
ISBN-13: 978-0618942633
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches

Widemans first novel in a decade conjures the author of The Wretched of the Earth and his urgent relevance today Widemans fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoir to evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of The Wretched of the Earth. A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1927, Fanon fought to defend France during World War II and then later against France in Algerias war for independence. The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961, inspired leaders of liberation movements from Steve Biko in South Africa to Che Guevera to the Black Panthers in the United States. Widemans 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, and part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood, and chases the meaning of Fanons legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.

God's Gym: Stories
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Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books (August 10, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618711996
ISBN-13: 978-0618711994
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches

From one of the most renowned authors of our time comes the eagerly anticipated God's Gym, John Edgar Wideman's first story collection in more than a decade. In these stories, Wideman offers an unadulterated view of contemporary life, exploring gender, race, family, and relationships.

Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman
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TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds.

ISBN: 157233469X
Pub. Date: April 2006
Format: Hardcover, 312pp
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press

John Edgar Wideman is one of the most prominent African American writers today. He is the first author to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-once in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet, despite all of Wideman's accolades and renown, there are only three full-length studies on his work to date.

TuSmith's and Byerman's Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman takes a bold step in expanding Wideman scholarship. This volume is an indispensable study of Wideman's oeuvre, covering the full range of his career by addressing the key features of his fiction and nonfiction from 1967 to the present.

The essays in this book reflect the most advanced thinking on Wideman's prolific, extraordinary art. The collection features at least one article on each major work and includes the voices of both well-established and emerging scholars. Though their critical perspectives are diverse, the contributors place Wideman squarely at the center of contemporary African American literature as an exemplar of postmodern approaches to literary art. Several position Wideman within the context of his predecessors-Wright, Baldwin, Ellison-and within a larger cultural context of music and collective history. The essays examine Wideman's complex style and his blending of African and Western cosmologies and aesthetics, the use of personal narrative, and his imaginative revisioning of forgotten historical events. These insightful analyses cover virtually every stage of Wideman's career and every genre in which he has written. A detailed bibliography of Wideman's work is also included.

Informed yet accessible, this collection will be a rich source of information and intellectual stimulus for teachers, students, and scholars in American and African American literature, as well as general readers interested in Wideman's multilayered and challenging texts.

Bonnie TuSmith is the author or editor of several books, including Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Past president of MELUS, the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, she is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University.

Keith E. Byerman serves on the editorial board of African American Review and is president of the John Edgar Wideman Society. He is the author of several books, including The Short Fiction of John Edgar Wideman. He is a professor of English at Indiana State University.

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
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ISBN: 0684850044
Pub. Date: February 2005
Format: Paperback, 848pp
Publisher: Scribner

By any measure, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) fundamentally altered the course of history. Published at the fifth anniversary of Carmichael's death, this long-awaited autobiography fills a yawning gap in the American historical record as it chronicles the legendary civil rights leader's work as chairman of SNCC, patriarch of Black Power, Pan-African activist, and social revolutionary. It is an unflinching, searing, often visionary testament to the man's legacy and joins the works of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela as a crucial and colorful contribution to contemporary history.

As in life, the Carmichael in these pages is the definition of charisma and determination. In sharp prose full of Carmichael's candor, wit, irrepressible sense of irony, and undying love for his people, Ready for Revolution relates with clear-eyed intelligence the epic struggle for human liberation in our time. Carmichael -- who in 1978 changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of his mentors, the revolutionary African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure -- recounts the course of his own experience and struggles, ranging from the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi through the firefights and political intrigue of the African liberation wars to Black Power and Pan-Africanism. His transformation from immigrant child to impassioned activist is spellbinding. Populated with an international cast of luminaries, including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Miriam Makeba, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, Ready for Revolution captures, as few books ever have, the pulse of the cultural upheavals that define the modern world.

More than the sum of its parts, this book is the personal testimony of a supremely courageous and committed African-American freedom fighter, radical thinker, and warm and engaging human being. Regardless of whether one subscribes to Carmichael's politics and ideas, there is no denying the overwhelming influence he had on American lives and history. And his view from the eye of the black-struggle storm is invaluable.

Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
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ISBN: 061850964X
Pub. Date: January 2005
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

From "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire — a young boy who was seen running from the flames. An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe"

Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir
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ISBN: 0618509631
Pub. Date: January 2005
Format: Paperback, 272pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir about two brothers — one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. 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 Wideman to his brother and measures the distance that lies between them.

Author Description
John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are Hoop Roots and The Island: Martinique. He teaches at Brown University.

Sent for You Yesterday
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ISBN: 0395877296
Pub. Date: April 1998
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

A stunning novel. "Mr. Wideman returns to the ghetto where he was raised and transforms it into a magical location."--New York Times Review of Books

Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth Homewood, Pittsburgh -Wideman creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, "he establishes aamythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology" (New York Times Book Review).

Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love
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ISBN: 0618257756
Pub. Date: February 2003
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

While presenting a memoir of discovering basketball, novelist Wideman (U. of Massachusetts-Amherst) reveals much about the origins of black basketball in the US.

A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, John Edgar Wideman's Hoop Roots brings "a touch of Proust to the blacktop" (Time) as it tells of the author's love for a game he can no longer play. Beginning with the scruffy backlot playground he discovered in Pittsburgh some fifty years ago, Wideman works magical riffs that connect black music, language, culture, and sport. His voice modulates from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, in describing the game that has sustained his passion throughout his life.

My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature
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ISBN: 0345455665
Pub. Date: October 2002
Format: Paperback, 1280pp
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

From New York Times bestselling author John Edgar Wideman, this powerful collection of African-American literature through the centuries focuses on classic works by notable authors from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. DuBois. The poetry of 18th-century writers Phillis Wheatly and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave join a chorus of eloquent voices chronicling the black experience in America in this wonderful celebration of literary heritage.

My Soul Has Grown Deep includes such landmark works as A Red Record by Ida B. Wells, a Harlem Renaissance writer; Lyrics of a Lowly Life by the prolific playwright, poet, and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar; Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington; and The Autobiography of Jack Johnson: In the Ring and Out by the heavyweight boxing champion. Each writer is introduced in an informative biographical essay by Wideman.

The Cattle Killing
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ISBN: 0395877504
Pub. Date: September 1997
Format: Paperback, 224pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

"Fiercely beautifully and deeply affecting."
–Vanity Fair

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.

Two Cities: A Love Story
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ISBN: 0618001859
Pub. Date: September 1999
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

...[G]oes beyond the conventions of a simple love story....one after another...passages open uschange usand then move on....Two Cities...[captures] images of...everyday surroundings to reveal the crimes and passions of our world. —Walter Mosley, The New York Times Book Review

This redemptive, healing love story brings to "masterful" (Philadelphia Inquirer) culmination the themes Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. "A harmonic blending of high and low, of the music of the streets and the music of the spheres" (New York Times), Two Cities celebrates the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways people redeem themselves in a society that is failing them.

Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
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ISBN: 0679737510
Pub. Date: August 1995
Format: Paperback, 197pp
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated

With resonant artistry and unflagging directness, Wideman examines the tragedy of race and the gulf it cleaves between black fathers and black sons. He does so chiefly through the lens of his own relations with his remote father, producing a memoir that belongs alongside the classics of Richard Wright and Malcolm X.

In the tradition of his best-selling Brothers and Keepers, which was about himself and his imprisoned brother, John Edgar Wideman ("our most powerful and accomplished artist of the urban black world" - Los Angeles Times Book Review) gives a searingly honest meditation on "fathers, color, roots, time, and language." Certain to galvanize national attention, Fatheralong is a fiercely lyrical and revealing memoir that attempts all the while, "among other things, to break out, displace, replace the paradigm of race [America's enduring malaise]." As Wideman puts it: "Teach me who I might be, who you might be - without it." From affluent Amherst to blue-collar Pittsburgh to rural South Carolina, here is the story of an American family. Wresting himself free from the shackles of racial ideology, Wideman bravely engages not only the living but also the "ghostlier demarcations" of his family's past, the better to understand who he is today and to heal familial wounds. Fatheralong is a triumphant book of reckoning, an inspiring celebration of homecoming.

Damballah (Homewood Trilogy)
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ISBN: 0395897971
Pub. Date: July 1998
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

John Edgar Wideman grew up in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, a setting he has used for a number of his award-winning novels and stories. Damballah, Wideman's collection of stories about the fictionalized black community of Homewood, is the first in a trilogy consisting of Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday. Somewhat autobiographical, the books are linked by shared characters, events, and locales, like much of Wideman's writing, the stories in Damballah are intense and lyrical examinations of the intense psychological experience of black people in urban America. –Sacred Fire

This collection of interrelated stories spans the history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh community founded by a runaway slave. With stunning lyricism, Wideman sings of "dead children in garbage cans, of gospel and basketball, of lost gods and dead fathers" (John Leonard). It is a celebration of people who, in the face of crisis, uphold one another--with grace, courage, and dignity.

Hiding Place (Homewood Trilogy)
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ISBN: 039589798X
Pub. Date: July 1998
Format: Paperback, 160pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company