John Edgar Wideman's books include Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow and has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. In 2017, Wideman won the Prix Femina Étranger for Writing to Save a Life. He divides his time between New York and France.

Wideman's writing, like Toni Morrison's, is so pure and convincing that he can break the rules of classical storytelling, even invent some new ones

Wideman is one of the nation's literary treasures, and his contribution is a dazzling, delirious achievement: as his narrator, perched on edge of the Williamsburg Bridge, prepares for suicide, he delivers a cri de coeur that ranges from Sonny Rollins to the Yalu River and becomes nothing less than a meditation on the extraordinary resilience of ordinary black lives in the American Century

A profound writer

Wideman is at the top of his form . . . The brilliance of his language, the power of his storytelling and the sheer bravado and unexpectedness of his riffs exert considerable charms

Wideman can write . . . He can make the ordinary scene sing the blues like nobody's business

Wideman astonishes us . . . insisting on our attention by the very daring of his prose and the authority with which he proceeds

A writer who belongs in our permanent library