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 antislavery crusader John Brown and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. A man sits on the edge of Williamsburg Bridge, contemplating suicide. The author considers the death 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.