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“... Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John EdgarWideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any of Wideman’s books that I’ve read. But they are not detective stories ...”

“... by the gifted black writers Brent Staples (Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White) and John EdgarWideman (Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society). One wonders what Gates’s fate might have been if he had been born in a black urban ghetto, and not in Piedmont, West Virginia. Among ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John EdgarWideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the ...”