Word: wideman
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Seven prominent writers appeared at the event, including Stephen King, author of Needful Things, Carrie, Misery and several other popular horror novels; Jonathan Kozol, author of Rachel and Her Children and Savage Inequalities), John Edgar Wideman, author of Philadelphia Fire, and Jamaica Kincaid, author of Lucy...
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman. This fiction revolves around a fact: the May 1985 fire bombing (ordered by a black mayor) of a Philadelphia house occupied by a black organization called Move. But that is only the starting point for a prolonged, dramatic monologue on racism in the U.S. and the possibility that the birth of the nation was accompanied by a genetic disorder...
...destroyed in order to save it. For Cudjoe, the big bang represents creation in the form of a mysterious survivor, a boy known as Simba Muntu (Lion Man) seen walking away from the burning wreckage. The search for Simba provides the novel with an open-ended structure that allows Wideman to display his talents...
...play it hot or sweet, highbrow or low-down. Wideman takes risks that do not always pay off. Writing in dialect is dangerous, and there are labored passages of multicultural rap that combine Shakespeare's Tempest and Third World politics: "Today's lesson is this immortal play about colonialism, imperialism, recidivism, the royal f over of weak by strong, colored by white, many by few, or, if you will, the birth of the nation's blues seen through the fish-eye lens of a fee fi foe englishmon...
...Wideman is best when he is most personal: a description of a schoolyard basketball game, a grieving meditation after a telephone call from a son in prison. Or this bitter college recollection about feeling as if he were in a test tube from an uncertain liberal experiment: "I was walking down the street with this cute little white coed, thinking we're minding our business, strolling to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and blam. Run right dead into the glass wall." To Wideman, the stares seemed to say "Wait a minute, boy . . . You still in the tube, nigger...