Languages of home

Languages of home Essays on writing, hoop, and American lives, 1971-2025

John Edgar Wideman

Book - 2025

"John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country's literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, in this first-time collection from his extensive body of long-form journalism and biographical essays, readers are offered a chance to see and judge for themselves how Wideman has proven himself to be a luminous witness of America's history. This volume goes beyond mere compilation; its challenging, insightful critical essays tell the story of a nation in transition--from the shame of legalized human slavery, to the Civil Rights Movement, t...o the rise of the Obama era, and beyond. Originally featured in publications such as Esquire, Vogue, and The New Yorker, these narratives explore the elusive cores of an American culture, politics, and identity. With his unique depictions of iconic figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Emmett Till, and Michael Jordan, and intimate questioning of his own life, Wideman shares his original views of the changing tides of an American experience."

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this
1 being processed
Coming Soon
Subjects
African Americans > History.
United States > History > 1969-
United States > Social life and customs > 1971-
United States > Social conditions > 1945-
Essays.
Genres
Essays
Published
New York, NY : Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
John Edgar Wideman (author)
Other Authors
Mitchell S. Jackson (writer of introduction)
Edition
First Scribner hardcover edition
Item Description
Title dates on the title page and front cover of dust jacket differ.
Physical Description
xiii, 382 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781668036372
  • Introduction
  • Fear in the Streets The American Scholar (1971)
  • Review: The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt The American Scholar (1972)
  • Review: The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre The New York Times Book Review (1973)
  • Defining the Black Voice in Fiction Black American Literature Forum (1977)
  • Review: Stomping the Blues: Ritual in Black Music and Speech American Poetry Review (1978)
  • The Language of Home The New York Times Book Review (1985)
  • Preface: Charles W. Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1985)
  • What Is Afro, What Is American? The New York Times Book Review (1986)
  • The Black Writer and the Magic of the Word The New York Times Book Review (1988)
  • Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide Esquire (1990)
  • Preface: Breaking Ice ed. Terry Macmillan (1990)
  • Introduction: The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1990)
  • Dead Black Men and Other Fallout from the American Dream Esquire (1992)
  • Monument to Malcolm Vogue (1992)
  • Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood
  • Preface: The Homewood Books by John Edgar Wideman (1992)
  • Father Stories The New Yorker (1995)
  • Introduction: Live from Death Row by Mumia Abu-Jamal (1995)
  • Playing Dennis Rodman The New Yorker (1996)
  • Justice: A Perspective Outside the Law, ed. Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve
  • The Silence of Thelonious Monk Callaloo (1997)
  • In Praise of Silence Callaloo (1998)
  • This Man Can Play Esquire (1998)
  • What Is a Brother? Esquire (1998)
  • The Night I Was Nobody McCalls (1999)
  • Foreword: Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston (2001)
  • Whose War: The Color of Terror Harper's (2002)
  • Looking at Emmett Till In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (2005)
  • At the Island's End The New York Times Magazine (2006)
  • From The Louis Till Blues Project Callaloo (2011)
  • Witness: A Letter from France The New Yorker (2015)
  • Doo-Wop (2025)
Review by Booklist Review

Through a mixture of journalism, literary and cultural criticism, and biographical and political essays, the varied career of the prolific Wideman is on full display in this new collection of his long-form nonfiction writing. The essays in this dynamic volume, curated by the author, offer an expansive array of work that has made Wideman, as Mitch S. Jackson writes in the introduction, "essential to world literature, a paradigmatic writer's writer, one of, if not the greatest, of my people to ever make art from words." Whether poetically illustrating the memory of a long-lost love, replete with vivid and transportive descriptions of Thelonious Monk's life and music, or parsing the flimsy justifications of the war on terror in the nearly immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, or, as in the sublime titular essay, examining the ways in which "a minority culture systematically prevented from outward expression of its dreams, wishes, and aspirations must evolve ways for both individuals and the group to sustain its underground life" through a shared and familiar language, Wideman is always insightful, honest, and absorbing. This collection is an essential addition to a masterful oeuvre and a perfect companion to Wideman's short fiction anthology, You Made Me Love You (2021).

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist, essayist, and critic Wideman (Slaveroad) delivers a profound, career-spanning collection of essays on literature, sports, and culture. Early entries consist largely of critical analyses of writings by Charles W. Chesnutt, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois, with Wideman declaring in one: "Like Freud's excavations of the unconscious... Du Bois's insights have profoundly altered the way we look at ourselves." The essays become increasingly personal over time; Wideman imbues his passion for basketball into the 1990 piece "Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide," which explores how the NBA player's success challenged racial and societal norms. Wideman has been observing societal fault lines for decades, writing more than 50 years ago that "as a society we seem to be systematically eliminating the middle ground between extremes." Tragedy and trauma inform many of these pieces, including "Looking at Emmett Till," in which Wideman argues that the brutal 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old "was an attempt to slay an entire generation." Incisive and enthralling, the collection puts Wideman's keen critical eye and cultural awareness on full display. The result is an essential chronicle of the American experience. (Nov.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A gathering of sharply focused essays by the distinguished novelist. "The peculiar and perhaps fatal American violence is the refusal to connect," writes Wideman. One aspect of that refusal gives this collection its title, as the author recounts gazing, as a youngster, into a confectioner's shop in his native Pittsburgh, his pockets full from the proceeds of his paper route, and pronouncing the prices "exorbitant," infuriating a white passerby. Wideman knows why: "I'd stolen a piece of their language. Not only was it in my possession, I also had the nerve to flaunt it in a public place, in their righteous faces." Another source for the title is the author's close attention to language: the blending of "literate and oral traditions" in Gayl Jones' novelCorregidora, the use of dialect in 19th-century literature, and the contrary refusal of the poet Phillis Wheatley to use anything but "the eighteenth-century literary code of English, a code doubly foreign, a tradition in which her achievements seem both miraculous and pedestrian." One of several tours de force here is Wideman's long meditation on, among other things, the unhappy fate that befell Louis Till, estranged father of Emmett, who was executed for allegedly committing rape in Italy during World War II; the author has long been attuned to issues of justice and injustice, with an early essay on white police in Black communities carrying a blunt message: "Whatever else the policeman is, he is also a further validation of the cage." Wideman's serious considerations of history and culture are punctuated by several perceptive pieces on hoops, writing in one that "playground basketball is the most democratic of games" and celebrating the sui generis style of Dennis Rodman, whom, in a fine literary turn, he groups alongside Caliban and Frankenstein's monster as "neither one thing or another." Brittle and brilliant, a welcome record of Black life and thought in an often unwelcoming nation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Similar Items