“You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories, 1981-2018”

By John Edgar Wideman (Scribner; 496 pages; $30)

This careerspanning compendium of short stories by the nearly 80yearold John Edgar Wideman (“Brothers and Keepers”) highlights the full range of his masterful talent and linguistic dexterity, with sentences that flutter, shimmy and thunder off the page.

Beginning with selections taken from “Damballah” (1981) and stretching up through “American Histories” (2018), Wideman’s work mixes starkeyed realism, African spiritualism and rich, nuanced portraits of the Black diaspora with bits of autofiction in between.

Though some pieces are set in farflung locales like rural Wyoming and Manhattan (“Williamsburg Bridge” actually succeeds in blending suicidal themes and humor), many take place in a semifictional version of the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, the historically Black neighborhood where Wideman grew up. (“Weight” is a stunner.)

Others turn a spotlight on the cold, cruel nightmare that is the criminal justice system. The heartrending “Solitary” and the splitperspective “All Stories Are True” describe the grueling, minute details of what it feels like to visit a family member in prison or to be incarcerated. (“Ain’t nobody home in them eyes. They shuffle around here like ghosts.”)

If you’ve never read short fiction by one of the genre’s greatest living legends, now’s your chance. In this collection of 57, there’s barely a dud in the bunch.