The New York Times Book Review - Martha Southgate
…Wideman puts us on notice: Wherever we're going with him, we're going to engage with America's unhealed wounds of slavery and racism—and it's not going to be comfortable or easy. Wideman's stories range widely over experiences from slavery to the present day…All are illumined by a searching intelligence and a willingness to test the boundaries of the short story form…American Histories is not here to be liked. It's here to challenge you. And that it does.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/29/2018
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. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
With the scrupulous intelligence and meditative intensity that define all this author’s work . . . . Mr. Wideman’s explicit subject is racial injustice but his treatment of it quietly deepens into existential horror. . . . This, then, is not a book for the unwary. Mr. Wideman possesses a true and terrible vision of the tragic.”
—Wall Street Journal
"A powerful assemblage of short stories exploring late-in-life angst through personal myth, cultural memory, and riffs on an empire scorched by its own hubris ... His prose, its twisting suntax, is a kind of stylish jazz of his own making."
—O Magazine
"Wideman's 50-year writing career has won him countless awards, and the author proves his continued vitality, reimagining historical figures with vigor and soul."
—Entertainment Weekly
"Race and its reverberations are at the core of this slim, powerful volume, a blend of fiction, memoir, and reimagined history, in which the boundaries between those forms are murky and ever shifting."
—Boston Globe
"John Edgar Wideman's latest book feels like a coda to his impressive body of work. He deftly incorporates a range of black names from the 20th century — Emmett Till, Jean-Michel Basquiat — in his riffs, then plunges deeper into history."
—Seattle Times
"John Edgar Wideman has established himself as one of the country's most formally inventive writers ... an important addition to Mr. Wideman’s body of writing and a remarkable demonstration of his ability to address social issues through a range of fictional forms and styles."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Wideman . . . boldly subverts what a short story can be in this wonderful collection. . . . Each story feels new, challenging, and exhilarating, beguilingly combining American history with personal history."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"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.
—Kirkus, starred review
"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."
—Booklist, starred review
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-01-23
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.
