American Histories

These stories offer spellbinding reflections on abolitionists and artists, fathers and sons, the bonds of family and the pull of memory. A re-imagined conversation takes place between white anti-slavery crusader John Brown and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A man sits on the edge of Williamsburg Bridge, contemplating suicide. The author considers the deaths of his brother, uncle, mother and niece.
John Edgar Wideman'
s fiction challenges the boundaries of the form. Emotionally precise and intellectually stimulating, this is Wideman at his best.