You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories 1981-2018

About this book

A powerful and stunning (Publishers Weekly starred review) selection of the best of John Edgar Widemans short stories over his fifty-year career representing the wide range of his intellectual and artistic pursuits. When John Edgar Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019 he joined a list of esteemed writersfrom Eudora Welty to George Saundersall of whom are acknowledged masters of the short story. Widemans commitment to short fiction has been lifelong and here he gathers a representative selection from throughout his career stories that have a wary brooding spirit a lonely intelligenceand air the problem of consciousness including the fragile contingency of our existence (The New York Times). Widemans stories are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood but they range far beyond there to the small western towns of Wyoming and historic Philadelphia the contemporary world and the ancient past. He explores the interior lives of his characters and the external pressures that shape them. These stories are as intellectually intricate as they are rich with the language and character. Wideman has been compared to William Faulkner and James Baldwinthese prove that he is every bit as masterful a cartographer of the American spirit as his forebears" (Esquire). Comprised of thirty-five stories drawn from past collections (American Histories Briefs Gods Gym All Stories Are True Fever and Damballah) and an introductory essay by the National Book Critics Circle board member and scholar Walton Muyumba this volume of Widemans selected stories celebrates the lifelong significance of this major American writers essential contribution to a formilluminating the ways that he has made it his own. If there were any doubts Wideman belongs to the American canon this puts them to bed (Publishers Weekly starred review).