The career of writer John Edgar Wideman has been the sort of success story on which America prides itself. Coming from an inner-city African American neighborhood, he studied at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Oxford; published his first novel at age twenty-six; won two PEN/Faulkner Awards, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant”; and has held several top teaching posts. But profound tragedy has also marked his life: both his brother and son received life sentences for murder, and a nephew was killed at home after a bar fight. His life thus illustrates how the strictures of “race” temper American notions of freedom and opportunity.
Wideman’s engagement with race and identity has been nuanced and complex, taking the form of what Michel Feith sees as a critical dialogue with modernity–a moment in history which gave birth not only to the Enlightenment but also to American slavery and the conundrum of “race.” Feith argues that the key work in the Wideman oeuvre is The Cattle Killing (1996), his only “historical novel,” whose threads include the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, the 1856–57 Cattle Killing prophecy, which wreaked havoc among the Xhosa tribe of South Africa, and the contemporary situation of black ghettos in the United States. Unfolding within the early days of the American Republic, the novel offers a window through which all of Wideman’s works and their central concerns—ghettoization, imprisonment, familial relationships, emancipation, and the diasporic sense of history—can be understood.
With clarity and theoretical sophistication, Feith offers provocative new readings of Wideman’s texts, from the “Homewood” books based on his youth in Pittsburgh to his haunting memoir Brothers and Keepers. In the “postmodern” era, Feith suggests, critics of modernity are not in short supply, but few have the depth, rigor, and thoughtfulness of John Edgar Wideman.
Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful.
Excerpt from “Letter”
Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud
just as when we touch a body or door, or think
of the dead come back, romancing
us through the warp of memory, lighting a way
by luring . . .
The Selva Maya (Jungle of the Maya) is one of the world's most magical yet least appreciated places—an enormous tropical forest that encompasses much of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. At 9,000,000 acres, it is the largest contiguous tropical forest north of the Amazon in the Western Hemisphere. Within its borders, the Selva Maya provides habitat for an astonishing diversity of plants and animals—more than 500 species of birds alone. The forest also contains the fascinating ruins of ancient Maya cities, which attract visitors and researchers from all over the globe.
Jungle of the Maya presents a stunning photographic portrait of this irreplaceable natural treasure. Nature photographers Douglas Goodell and Jerry Barrack capture the living wonders of the jungle—jaguars and other cats; spider and howler monkeys; hummingbirds and butterflies; and snakes, amphibians, and insects—as well as the region's hallmark Maya sites, including Tikal, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Tulum. Environmental writer Jim Wright invitingly describes the Selva Maya's natural and human history, helping visitors and residents appreciate the riches to be found in the forest and the need to protect and preserve them for generations to come.
Because human activities are encroaching more and more on the Mayan forest, Jungle of the Maya is a beautiful book with a timely message. As renowned naturalist Archie Carr III sums it up in his foreword, "Today, the Selva Maya is at risk again. As modern beings, can we manage the forest better than we believe the ancient Maya did? We should. We have the archaeological record to draw from. We have modern science. And we still have inspiration whispered to us by spirits in the great plazas of Tikal and beyond. Turn the pages, and witness."
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