Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Lynchers | 1973 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 2 | A Glance Away | 1975 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 3 | Hurry Home | 1986 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 4 | Reuben | 1987 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 5 | Philadelphia Fire | 1990 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 6 | The Cattle Killing | 1996 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 7 | Two Cities | 1997 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 8 | Fanon | 2008 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
John Edgar Wideman’s standalone novels span thirty-five years of American literary fiction. His early work includes A Glance Away, his debut, and Hurry Home, both of which show a writer finding his voice in experimental prose. The Lynchers takes on a group of Black men in Philadelphia plotting a public lynching of a white police officer as a form of political theater.
Philadelphia Fire (1990) is widely considered one of his strongest novels. It grew out of the 1985 MOVE crisis, when Philadelphia police bombed a row house occupied by the Black liberation group MOVE, and the resulting fire destroyed sixty-one homes. Wideman turned that real event into a fractured, angry novel about a writer trying to find a boy who survived the fire. Later novels like The Cattle Killing and Two Cities continued his interest in how history and violence echo through Black communities. Fanon, his most recent novel, imagines a biographer trying to write about the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon.