SOURCE: Gorra, Michael. “The Choral Voice of Homewood.” The New York Times Book Review (14 June 1992): 13.

In the following favorable review of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, Gorra compares Wideman's short fiction to that of William Faulkner.

Any American fiction writer who sets the bulk of his work in the same place, or who draws repeatedly on the same characters, inevitably faces comparison with William Faulkner. With John Edgar Wideman's inner-city Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood that comparison is particularly apt, though not for those simple reasons alone.

It is appropriate because the stretched-to-the-breaking-point syntax with which Mr. Wideman captures his characters' inner lives seems at times an echo of Faulknerese. It is appropriate because both are concerned with the life of a community over time. It is appropriate because they both have a feel for the anecdotal folklore through which a community defines itself, because they both often...