Philadelphia Fire

Description

From 'one of America's premier writers of fiction' (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the centre of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire - a young boy who was seen running from the flames. One of the most ambitious and highly praised works of fiction, Philadelphia Fire is an impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.

John Edgar Wideman's books include Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Dreams, 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. He divides his time between New York and France.

A passionate, angry and formally fascinating novel of urban disintegration * * New York Times * * Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe * * San Francisco Chronicle * * A pyrotechnic display . . . 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 * * Boston Globe * * Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man * * Time * * Philadelphia Fire delivers its message with a careening momentum and astonishing precision . . . Wideman has made fire his own, and there are fire figures everywhere, illuminating us and driving us back with heat and smoky confusion * * Los Angeles Times * * Wideman astonishes us . . . insisting on our attention by the very daring of his prose and the authority with which he proceeds * * Philadelphia Inquirer * * In incantatory, lyrical, naturalistic and inventive prose, Wideman writes of sex and race and life in the city, with all the beauty, profane humour and literary complexity of Joyce writing about Dublin * * Publishers Weekly * * A tale of survival in which the author himself finds redemption in his art. With its dark and cynical humor, this metafiction will disturb as many readers as it dazzles * * Kirkus Reviews * * There is a very obvious reason why John Edgar Wideman is one of America's most celebrated authors: he is very good * * Washington Post * * A profound writer -- RICHARD FORD