Major literary figure and “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman uses his unique generational perspective to explore what he calls the “slaveroad,” a daunting, haunting reality that runs throughout American history.

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.

In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard”, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.”

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.”

About The Author

John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman’s books include, among others, Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone, You Made Me Love You, American Histories, Writing to Save a Life, Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and Sent for You Yesterday. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. He divides his time between New York and France.

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner (October 8, 2024)
Length: 224 pages
ISBN13: 9781668057230

Raves and Reviews

A New York Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

"Long heralded as one of literature’s preeminent voices, John Edgar Wideman has faithfully chronicled the experiences of African Americans for almost 60 years...This book offers a fresh perspective of slavery’s impact and a confirmation of Wideman’s exalted status in American letters."
—New York Magazine

"Part autofiction, part history and part memoir, this book is an alchemy of genres. Wideman meditates on the word “slaveroad” as a metaphor—both temporal and corporeal—to examine its various meanings and its connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade."
—The New York Times

"A work of bruising candor and obsessive originality, [Slaveroad] makes sense only outside the constraints of clock time, beyond trends or movements or even any contemporary notion of ‘relevance'....the Nobel committee has not given an American fiction writer the literature prize for more than 30 years, but if its members are of a mind to, I hope they begin their considerations here."
—Wall Street Journal

“[Wideman] tells and retells powerful, miry tales in Slaveroad that are incantatory, transporting and incendiary.”
—New York Times Book Review

"An agonized howl, a lament, an audacious quest to ‘revisit and reify moments in my life that haunt and form me."
—LA Times

"A genre-defying and clear-eyed meditation on the roiling effects of transatlantic slavery on past and present lives, including [Wideman’s] own…By mining the depths of our shared history across place and time in his impassioned “Slaveroad,” Wideman invites us to come along with him on a journey (or a daring, self-excavating exercise?) both immeasurably rigorous and rewarding."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the 'slaveroad' that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system...[for] fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates."
—The Millions