John Edgar Wideman has firmly established himself as one of the most respected contemporary writers, as evidenced by his receipt of the P.E.N./Faulkner Award in 1984 and 1991. The author of ten books of fiction and an autobiographical...

During the 1960s, the architects of the black arts movement--Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Addison Gayle, and others--demanded that black writers use their talents and works for the betterment of the black...

Cynthia Ozick stood before a full house of literary fans, her white hair shining as she assessed an art form that could be likened to an old, but vital patriarch _ rich, historic and, the author feared, increasingly neglected.The short story."In serious mainstream magazines nowadays,...

In the following essay, Trussler draws parallels between the ekphrastic elements of Donald Barthelme's “The Balloon,” Salman Rushdie's “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” and Wideman's “What He Saw.”

Rushdy is an educator and the author of The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (1992). In the following essay, he discusses the significance of the narrator gaining his "blues voice" in the Homewood trilogy.

In the following essay, Raynaud explores the relationship between writing, creative imagination, and reality in Wideman's “Surfiction” as well as the story's link to Charles Chesnutt's short story “A Deep Sleeper.”

In "Our Time," John Wideman bravely dives into the pits of a scorpion society - one that juxtaposes the poor and minorities with the rich and people in power - in an attempt to understand how society affects the lives of each individual in its clutches.