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Philadelphia Fire

By: John Edgar Wideman
Narrated by: Landon Woodson
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Publisher's Summary

One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by Black liberation group Move.

In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing 11 people and starting a fire that destroyed 60 other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames.

Award-winning author John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel. “Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Time) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s SongPhiladelphia Fire is a masterful, culturally significant work that takes on a major historical event and takes us on a brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.

©1990 John Edgar Wideman (P)2023 Audible, Inc.

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