John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds and persists. An impassioned, searching work, SLAVEROAD is one man’s reckoning with a uniquely American lineage and the ways that the past haunts the present: “It’s here. Now. Where we are. What we are. A story compounded of stories told, retold, untold, not told.”

In LOOK FOR ME AND I'LL BE GONE, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior? The story “Separation” begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather’s coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. “Atlanta Murders” starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin’s report on the 1979-1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia.

When John Edgar Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019, he joined a list of esteemed writers --- from Eudora Welty to George Saunders --- all of whom are acknowledged masters of the short story. Wideman’s commitment to short fiction has been lifelong, and here he gathers a representative selection from throughout his career, stories that challenge what defines, separates and unites us; dare to push form and defy convention; and, to quote Wideman, seek to “deconstruct the given formulas of African American culture and life.”