John Edgar Wideman's books include American Histories, Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Dreams, and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.
"Unclassifiable and harrowing. The path through 'the very specific
American darkness that disconnects colored fathers from sons' is
found and lost and found again through prose that jumps and
shimmers, punches and croons. This is one of those books virtually
impossible to write...yet it has been written. And by a great
American writer."
--Joy Williams, author of Ninety-Nine Stories of God and The
Visiting Privilege
"Writing to Save a Life is a mercurial coupling of fact and fiction
from a profound writer. Wideman's conceit is that to grasp fully
the lives and deaths of Emmett, Mamie and Louis Till--son, mother,
father--one medium of human understanding is simply not adequate.
It is a rare and stirring document."
--Richard Ford
"[Wideman is] a towering figure in American literature... one
cannot deny the force of Wideman's vision and the measure of his
grief and moral concern. The great body of work that he has gifted
us carries voices and memories from the past into our present."
--The Nation
"A genre-defying mix of history, biography, and memoir that
explores the role of race in the 1945 court-martial of Louis Till,
a 23-year-old soldier who was executed for rape and murder while
serving in Italy."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"A provocative mix of nonfiction and imagined scenes ... [Wideman]
shines a light on Emmett's little-known father."
--Newsday
"A quietly harrowing postscript to the tragedy of Emmett Till [and]
a searching account of [Wideman's] attempt to learn more about the
short life of Louis Till."
--New York Times Book Review
"A searching tale of loss, recovery and deja vu that is part memoir
and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé ... At times
melancholy, at others raw and rippling with rage, Wideman
masterfully weaves together memory, history and archival documents
... to capture the cruel irony of the Tills' fate ... Haunting,
provocative, and inspired."
--Washington Post
"Brilliant and ultimately ferocious."
--Dallas Morning News
"Captivating ... Wideman revives an incredibly disturbing but
largely forgotten detail from the Emmett Till affair ... Like a
forensic defense attorney, [Wideman] interrogate[s] the file from
every possible angle: the questions not asked, the abridged
statements and translations, the mystery of Louis Till's silence
about his own guilt or innocence."
--Mother Jones
"Combining elements of original research, memoir, and informed
imagination, this moving account provides a poetic but dark vision
of racial injustice passed from father to son."
--Library Journal, starred
"Forty-nine years after the publication of his first book, Mr.
Wideman has forged 'Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, '
perhaps his most impressive armament so far ... A challenge to ...
rise up, open the door and see the shared humanity that some have
worked so hard to disguise. That is the key to John Wideman's
writing and it is our responsibility to seize it in the hope of
saving a life, be it an African-American man shot repeatedly for no
reason or our own."
--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Haunting."
--New York Magazine
"In a writing career that is already full of tremendous
achievements, this slim volume represents some of Wideman's most
powerful work."
--Literary Hub
"In his long awaited new book, Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar
Wideman tells the largely forgotten story of Louis Till, a man of
color who suffered a miscarriage of racial justice a full decade
before the infamous lynching of his son Emmett. Wideman pens a
powerful blend of fact and fiction, riffing on concerns and themes
that he has explored for a half century now in his highly
distinguished body of prose. These pages represent a wise and
wonderful achievement, both timely and timeless." --Jeffery Renard
Allen, author of the novels Song of the Shank and Rails Under My
Back
"John Edgar Wideman's Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File
excavates the forgotten prequel to a brutal chapter in the ongoing
history of American racial injustice. Wideman examines a particular
narrative--the way a father's death was exhumed to justify his
son's murderers going free--in order to question the terms of
narrative itself, refusing to mistake silence for significance,
absence for presence, or history for truth. I read this provocative
and surprising book in the wake of the murders of Alton Sterling
and Philando Castile, and it felt utterly essential. I was grateful
for Wideman's nimble intellect, his commitment to nuance, and his
insistence that we pay attention to the brutalities perpetrated
under the guise of justice."
--Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
"Reading Writing to Save a Life is to ride shotgun in [Wideman's]
tricked-out time machine to a familiar destination: the jagged
fault lines of America's racial divide."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"There are many layers of meaning in this book ... and the
narrative expands into a meditation on black fathers and sons, the
divide and the bonds, the genetic inheritance within a racist
society. A book seething with the passion and sense of outrage
behind the Black Lives Matter movement that also traces specific
roots of the movement's genealogy."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Wideman is one of the great prose stylists of contemporary
American fiction, a master of parallel fragments and the
question-as-statement."
--Bookforum
"With his trademark penetrating style, Wideman recounts the life of
Louis Till, the circumstances that brought him to his death, and
the circumstances that would end the life of his son 10 years
later."
--Booklist
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