Cassie McCullagh

And the next book we're going to talk about is by John Edgar Wideman.

Now, he's an African-American writer.

He's in his late 70s, is a professor emeritus at Brown University and

He's won so many literary and academic awards and he published his first novel in 1967.

Now, he has a brother and a son in prison for murder and he reveals parts of his own life in his fiction.

But Michael Delaney, you and I have both looked at the collection American Histories.

Is it right to call this a collection of short stories, do you think, Michael?

Because all the other books we've talked about so far, and they've been very varied in style and where they're from, but you could recognise them very clearly as short stories.

Whereas I think Wideman's playing around with the form a bit more.

So some of them read like reflective essays.

Some of them are more obviously short stories.

Well, and there's another one called Maps and Ledges, which in a way is mapping out the whole way, not only that he's been in the world, that other people have looked at him.

And it does this really interesting thing about code switching.

and the different way he appears and he tells the story of in his early days in an academic job and so that's when he knows how to talk a bit white to all of his colleagues and his mother called because his father had killed somebody and so he had to go and talk to her and they had to try to work out what had happened and he's really aware that the way he would talk to his mother

the way that he would talk to the other people in the families, it would literally, it would sound different.

His voice would be different.

And so in that sense, he's laying out parts of his life, but he's doing it with all the skills of a really, really experienced writer.

Tell us about that story.

In a way, he also seemed to me to be the most ambitious of all of the writers we've looked at today in terms of the actual subject matter of his stories.

Because, you know, insofar as he's playing with fiction, he can take us anywhere.