American Histories by John Edgar Wideman review – an immense and moving jazz riff

These haunting, irresistible short stories interrogate the consequences of violence against a backdrop of African American history and family tragedy

“Violence is as American as cherry pie,” the civil rights activist H Rap Brown informed us in the 1960s. The consequences of violence are what John Edgar Wideman has interrogated for decades in his tough but heart-rending books, returning repeatedly to the subject of his own African American family.

This latest collection of 21 short stories – some purely fictional, some autobiographical, in which the past is never put to rest – features tormented historical figures such as John Brown and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Alongside them he explores his family’s pathology, its unnatural deaths and imprisonments standing as proxy for America’s tragedy.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2spGwZV