John Edgar Wideman

"From “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman, a reissue of the revered trilogy that launched his career—two novels and story collection all set in Wideman’s own hometown. 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.”...

Philadelphia Fire, now with a new introduction by prominent scholar and award-winning writer Imani Perry, is a masterful culturally significant work that takes on a 1985 police bombing in Philadelphia, which targeted the Black liberation group known as MOVE. At the heart of the novel is Cudjoe, a writer and exile returned to his old neighborhood, who becomes obsessed with the search for a young boy seen running from the flames. One of Wideman's most...

A major literary figure tells "a searching tale of loss, recovery, and déja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé" (The Washington Post) about two generations of one family—civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis—shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Emmett Till took a train from his home in Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi; a few...

From a Nigerian boy's friendship with his family's former houseboy to a sweatshop girl's experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in academe, these stories have the economy and power to "break hearts bones vanities and cages."