Product Description
From the award-winning author of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist: a tender, hilarious, and supremely original novel about coming-of-age in the 80s.
 
Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own.
 
The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Like his fellow New Yorker Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead weaves gracefully through genres with each of his books, but Sag Harbor, billed as his "autobiographical fourth novel," seems positioned to be his breakout book--which is a funny thing for a writer who has already received so many major literary awards, including a MacArthur "Genius" grant and being short-listed for the Pulitzer.

The year is 1985 and 15-year-old Benji Cooper, one of the only black students at his elite Manhattan private school, leaves the city to spend three largely unsupervised months living with his younger brother Reggie in an enclave of Long Island's Sag Harbor, the summer home to many African American urban professionals. Benji's a Converse-wearing, Smiths-loving, Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerd whose favorite Star Wars character is the hapless bounty hunter Greedo (rather than the double-crossing Lando Calrissian). But Sag Harbor is a coming-of-age novelwhose plot side-steps life-changing events writ large. The book's leisurely eight chapters mostly concern Benji's first kiss, the removal of braces, BB gun battles, slinging insults (largely unprintable "grammatical acrobatics") with his friends, and working his first summer job. And Whitehead crafts a wonderful set piece describing Benji's days at Jonni Waffle Ice Cream, where he is shrouded in "waffle musk" and a dirty T-shirt that's "soiled, covered with batter and befudged from a sundae mishap."

Whitehead pushes his love of pop culture into hyper-drive. Nearly every page is swimming with references to the 1980s--from New Coke and The Cosby Show to late nights trying to decipher flickering glimpses of naked women on scrambled Cinemax. And music courses through the book, capturing that period when early hip hop mixed with New Wave. Lisa Lisa and U.T.F.O make a memorable cameo at Jonni Waffle, and McFadden & Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"--heard throughout the book in passing cars and boom boxes--gets tagged as "the black national anthem." Like that ubiquitous song, the soulful, celebratory, and painfully funny Sag Harbor and its chronicle of those lazy, sun-soaked days sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day, will stick with you long after closing its covers. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Amazon Exclusive: Jonathan Lethem Reviews Sag Harbor

Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City, will be published in October 2009, and is his first to be set in Manhattan. He is the author of seven novels including the New York Times bestseller The Fortress of Solitude, which was also a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice for 2003, and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, his stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times among others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Maine.

First, an immodest disclaimer: I knew Colson Whitehead was really, really good before you did. That's because we share a publisher, and an editor, and I was sent a copy of his first novel, The Intuitionist, and asked to give advance comment--"a pufferoon," as insiders affectionately call the things--which I gladly did. In fact, I not only admired The Intuitionist, but it was a book that made me immediately feel less lonely. I'd published four novels at that point, and Colson's helped me to feel my particular approach, the sorts of things I was trying to pull off in my novels, wasn't absolutely misconceived. In fact, I wanted to hitch my wagon to Colson's obvious rising star; his first novel was more flawless, more accomplished, than my own first--it might have been more accomplished than my fourth, I wasn't sure. I immediately sought Colson out as a friend, and he's been one of my own most crucial peers ever since.

Colson's books are all quite different from one another in milieu, strategy, and their ultimate effect on the reader, though united by the signal laconic meter in his voice, by their keen sense of form and proportion, by their brilliance. In Sag Harbor he's "gone personal," though I wouldn't want to have to place bets on what is and isn't his own life-material here, or someone else's, or completely confabulated. This is one of my favorite kinds of books, where memory's kinesthetic floodgates open up to illuminate a lost world. It's like a meticulous diorama of the recent past, with the sharp edges of an exhibit in a museum, one where we learn just how strange and specific the universal experience of "coming of age" really can be. The mundane stuff of a Long Island summer here has the power both of a time capsule, and of an allegorical journey into what every human heart endures just trying to vault out of one's family and into the world of art, sex, and kinship that's so near, and so far off. All this, plus the greatest barbequed chicken wing in the history of literature past, present, or future. That's a pufferoon I'd guarantee with my life. --Jonathan Lethem

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More from Colson Whitehead

Set over the summer of 1985, Sag Harbor, the fourth book from award-winning writer Colson Whitehead, is steeped in 1980s pop culture. Music plays a vital role in the novel, and in this exclusive annotated playlist Whitehead compiles a lineup of nine essential tracks of the early MTV era,including highlights from The Smiths, Run DMC, Bauhaus, and Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick.

And read our interview with Colson Whitehead as we talk about Sag Harbor and discuss some pop culture hits and misses from the 1980s, grilling tips, McFadden & Whitehead, 12-sided die, and the allure of Twitter.

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... Read more

Customer Reviews (83)

A wonderful ride
I agree with another reader who said that there isn't much of a theme to hang the story on.So if you've read other works by Whitehead, this book could be a disappointment.But if you approach Sag Harbor as a series of moments that grab the feelings of both the mid-80s and adolescence, you'll have a great time.As usual, the writing is sharp and funny but isn't short on compassion.I found myself lulled by the passing of Benji's summer only to get tripped up by late in the story observations about his parents, their marriage and how it has affected all their children in different ways.I suppose it's a novel where nothing really important happens but it's affecting all the same.

I wish HBO, Showtime or AMC would option this as a mini-series!

Well Written But Boring
I can appreciate the fine use of language in this book, but the pace of the book is painfully slow and their is no story, dramatic tension, or climax.Some reviewers have referred to it as an essay and that's pretty much what it is - a long exposition with no logical beginning, middle or end.

Entertaining and Insightful
I finished reading Sag Harbor today, and I will recommend it to friends (and strangers too I guess via this post).It's a good read.Entertaining & insightful. If you grew in the 80's, there are a lot of pop culture references that will remind you of that fun (but odd) decade. Also, the family dynamics described in the novel are spot on - the reader is pulled into the 15-year-old protagonist's (awkward) shoes. This is a very solid read.

A Cure for Insomniacs
This book was a selection for our book club.There was so much potential for this to book to be good, however, the author never developed any characters or even attempted to explain many of their odd behavior.When I read a summary of what this book was about, I was excited, because I remember this time with such fondness.However, for some reason instead of character development, the author spent pages and pages of describing scenes and objects which were not relevant. From the brief description of his family life, it was dysfunctional. Yet, instead of expanding and drawing on these characters, he spends 4 pages describing his walk to work.The walk added nothing to his story, but his family dynamics would have. It was absolutely painful trying to finish this book.To sum it up, the person that selected this book apologized several times during the meeting for selecting this book.

The Emergence of a Major Literary Voice
Like Philip Roth a generation earlier, Colson Whitehead writes elegantly and eloquently about what it feels like to be an upwardly mobile outsider in pursuit of the American dream.

The novel takes place in the summer of 1985. The protagonist, fifteen-year-old Benji Cooper (his initial effort to have the world address him using the more grown-up `Ben' is abandoned in the first few pages) is a bright African American kid from a well-to-do family. He and his slightly younger brother Reggie attend a predominantly white exclusive private school in an upscale Manhattan neighborhood where they are treated like exotic anomalies. People who encountered them on the street didn't know what to make of these two articulate, respectful African American boys wearing Brooks Brothers blazers, pressed slacks and perfectly knotted silk ties instead of doo-rags, gold chains and other hip-hop regalia.

Not completely comfortable in the white prep school milieu or the black street scene, for ten months of the year Benji and Reggie were at ease only with each other. Then came their summer in Sag Harbor, two carefree months in their parents' ranch bungalow, filled with schemes, adventures and, best of all, camaraderie with other well-off black kids just like them.

Whitehead captures the angst, eagerness and apprehension of adolescence burgeoning into adulthood pitch perfectly as Benji lands his first job, has his awkward first date, and struggles to be accepted by the cool kids. But what separates Sag Harbor from other coming-of-age in the summer stories like 'Good Bye Columbus,' 'Brighton Beach Memoirs' and 'Summer of `42' is its nuanced depiction of race and place.

Familiar yet exotic, alternately tender, touching and laugh-out-loud funny, 'Sag Harbor' will surprise and delight but never disappoint. ... Read more

Product Description
Colson Whitehead’s eagerly awaited and triumphantly acclaimed new novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival.It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come.Amazon.com Review
Colson Whitehead's second novel posits a folk antihero for the information age: junketeer and puff-piece-writing man J. Sutter. For his latest assignment, this freelance hack is sent to Talcott, West Virginia, to cover its John Henry Days festival and the unveiling of the United States Postal Service's John Henry stamp. Sutter hasn't devoted much thought to American mythology lately, or to the epic struggle of man vs. machine, or to anything else besides padding his expense account and cadging free drinks. Still, our hero is engaged in a private contest of his own--a kind of junket jag, in which he plans to attend a public relations event every single day. Alas, this journalistic obstacle course threatens to eradicate Sutter's soul, just as the folkloric steam shovel eradicated John Henry's body. Whitehead cuts back and forth between eras and exploits. And what begins as a media-saturated satire soon turns into a jazzy, expansive meditation on man, machine, nature, race, history, myth, and pop culture--in short, on America, as expressed through the story of (who else?) a former slave.

Following on the heels of Whitehead's widely praised debut, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days won't disappoint anyone who delighted in the first book's wonderfully quirky writing or its complex allegories of race. The historical set pieces here dazzle, and the author casts a withering eye on our media-driven culture: "Since the days of Gutenberg, an ambient hype wafted the world, throbbing and palpitating. From time to time, some of that material cooled, forming bodies of dense publicity." Still, these brilliant parts don't necessarily add up to a satisfying whole. Whitehead writes the kind of smart, allusive, highly wrought prose that is impressive sentence by sentence. Over the course of 400 pages, though, it can be somewhat daunting. It's a bit like eating a meal in which each of the seven courses comes topped with hollandaise sauce. Worse, some of the characters' motivations remain abstract, as if the author hovered so far above his creations that their foibles struck him as simple absurdities. In a novel of this caliber, of course, much can be forgiven. But one is eager to see Whitehead quit riffing and make an emotional investment in his characters. The result will be fiction that engages the heart as well as the head. --Mary Park ... Read more

Customer Reviews (38)

Big Endeavor
I love Whitehead's writing and the large endeavor he took on in the narrative. I was challenged to feel good about the ending. I felt like the book was missing a chapter.

Interesting
When I finished John Henry Days I felt that I wanted to know more about the title character.The most interesting chapters in this book were the historical ones.What was John Henry really like, what about Lil Bob, was John Henry's wife really Polly?The excerpt on Paul Robeson was also interesting.As for J., I too like Pamela was wondering what the J stands for?

I liked the Intuitionist better..
This is good too, although it took me a long time to actually finish it. It sat on the desk beside my bed for a few months, and, despite my best intentions, I read a few different books during that time while slightly avoiding this one. This one is a bit long, and at times I wondered if he's the sort of writer that people like to own more than they like to read.

But still, Whitehead is a force to be reckoned with. He writes like a white guy. There, I said it. More like Updike than Baldwin. That's what the hype is about. He's obviously a well read, educated brother that knows how to put words together. He throws up a fractured prism of thought and feedback and current from our culture. The result is quite interesting, although I'm sure this is not for everybody.

Good writing, but all over the place...
Grandiose undertaking presented in a convoluted epic of a story. Whitehead writes parallel stories that engage and is presented in a straight-forward, albiet alternating fashion, until about half-way through the novel, where it seems he loses focus or becomes bored and starts interjecting a series of new sub-plots in alternating seccession in the guise of a contributing back-story, but in reality this takes away from the main story. Once it's over, a feeling of importance permeates, but for all the loose ends this feeling is diminished a bit.

Long, but OK
JHD is too long, and it sometimes takes too much of a byroad to return to the main narrative. There is much beauty in those byways, but by the time you get back to J. and Pamela, you feel you've travelled too far to be happy about your return, and the two characters don't grip you like they could or should. What made The Intuitionist such a great book - the detailled accounts - is this novel's main flaw. ... Read more

Product Description
Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. This marvellously inventive, genre-bending, noir-inflected novel, set in the curious world of elevator inspection, portrays a universe parallel to our own, where matters of morality, politics, and race reveal unexpected ironies.Amazon.com Review
Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea atthe heart ofColson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. Thesetting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the timeless convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics andsmoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of thevertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevatorinspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.

Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectorsare understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligenceand diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Elevenin the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadlyfree fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using thecontroversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is,after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricistswould do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone onboth sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up totake the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead,"that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft,a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.

Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens thatoutside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readersare taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgentadventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive doubleagents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest revealsthe existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father ofIntuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriouslyentwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for theBlack Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now existswill instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications arehuge andthe denouement is elegantly philosophical.Most impressive ofall is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness,resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that'salways funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of hischaracters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadlyon him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson ... Read more

Customer Reviews (84)

needs an editor
Great ideas for a book, great themes for a book: everday occupation, blue collar workers, life in the big city, government agencies to make (vertical) transportation safer, racism, bias against women.It has a fine, surprises nearing the climax. All good, but the writing wanders painfully between scenes and times and people.Too vague, way to vague, to a pleasurable read

A powerful, energetic read
I came in a little nervous; racial allegories tend to be a little heavy-handed. The Intuitionist had just the right amount of subtlety, and stands up as a straight mystery too. Although the place seems to be some version of New York, the perceived era is always in flux; is it the turn of the century, modern times, or some other time entirely? It raises questions about how much progress we've really made.

The Intuitionist has its share of surprises and twists. Lila Mae is a strong, no nonsense protagonist, and a pleasure to follow into politics' seedy underbelly.

Truly Original
I have been trying to decide whether I have read an odder good novel. That is, I have read plenty of novels that were odd, but not worth a damn. This novel is both odd and really quite splendid. Author Colson Whitehead conjures an alternate universe in which elevator inspectors and engineers matter enormously. It is also an alternate universe in which the civil rights movement never happened; blacks are largely excluded from society's mainstream.

Whitehead writes with so much grace that you absolutely believe in his universe, and so much authority that you don't question why or how the universe got that way.

His heroine, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is an Intuitionist (there are two schools of inspection: empiricism and intuitionism); although Intuitionist methods are poorly understood and mistrusted by many, she has the highest accuracy rate in the department. The novel turns, however, on an incident that seems to point to her first failure; she sets herself to solving the mystery of how she could have been mistaken. In the process, she bumps up against political intrigues between Empiricists and Intuitionists who are battling for control of the elevator inspection guild, competing elevator manufacturing companies, and the mysterious background of the founder of Intuitionism.

The book succeeds in making you feel there is something profound about elevators, which is quite an accomplishment; from a philosophical point of view, Whitehead is less convincing: he challenges the practice of drawing conclusions from visible (or surface) evidence in favor of a mystical intuition. Since such talents don't reliably exist outside the fictive world, we can't really buy the notion that empiricism is not just wrong but racist; that is, we can buy it in a limited way (within the world of the novel)--we just can't take it with us.

Quite an extraordinary book, and beautifully done.

The Invisible Woman
The opening scenes of Colson Whitehead's first novel take place in the gritty, murky, mob-ruled city familiar to crime writers like David Goodis and Chester Himes, a landscape in which bribes are as common as gratuities, nosy reporters are spirited away to have fingers broken and stories canceled, low-life gangsters rifle through apartments while unwary tenants are away. But "The Intuitionist" goes further than its noir precedents, blending in a speculative allegory that flirts with the borders of science fiction and a deft parody of racial tensions that deliberately echoes Ralph Ellison's surreal symbolism. It's a nearly perfect mix of genres.

And did I mention it's about elevator inspectors? In fact, Whitehead may have written the great American novel about vertical transport. The ups and downs of this fictional Gotham are governed by these unsung heroes, who insure that its citizens can attain heights they'd never achieve on their own strength. With power comes corruption, however, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female inspector, is caught in the struggle between two competing factions for dominance of the elevator guild. The Empiricists ply their trade like latter-day phrenologists, taking "nuts-and-bolts" measurements to ascertain the safety and reliability of an elevator; they are "slaves to what they could see," they "look at the skin of things." The upstart Intuitionists--the school to which Watson belongs--peer past the surface of things to feel, or "intuit," the health of an elevator, conducting a sort of symbiotic stress test that the traditionalists regard as "hocus-pocus." The Intuitionists look at the spirit of things.

Whitehead carries this overt racial metaphor into the novel's more realist scenes. Early on, Lila Mae sneaks unnoticed into the guild members' local watering hole to find out why everyone's looking for her, and later, in a sardonically funny episode, she dons a caterer's outfit to attend the guild's annual dinner incognito; she's an invisible woman to those flabby, drunken white men who can't look past "the skin of things." Similarly, the deceased founder of the Intuitionist school, who is regarded as a prophet by its adherents (and who successfully concealed a closely held personal secret), is rumored to have left behind blueprints for the perfect elevator, a "black box" for the next stage of urban living and a utopian answer to physical uplift. Caught in the intrigues surrounding both the search for these alleged blueprints and the control of the city itself, Lila Mae is a modern-day answer to Horatio Alger, an augury of a post-millennial future in which everybody can move up.

Awesome!
Colson Whitehead has become one of my favorite authors. He is innovative and yet keeps the narrative moving in an awesome way. ... Read more

Product Description
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant. And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Worth It
Considering the money I spent on it and the fact that it was shipped overseas, the price was right.

no tension at all
I found this book oddly lacking in tension. Not all books have to have tension, but I got the feeling that this book was supposed to. The main character (whose name we never learn) is supposed to decide between two factions in a small town that have different ideas about how or whether to rename the town. The tension between these two opposing parties should be at the heart of this book, but I just couldn't bring myself to care (possibly because the alternative to the town's current name is just silly). The lack of tension is especially ironic when you consider the name of the town that the main character finally decides on, which I think is supposed to summarize the overall theme of the book: Struggle.

He Who Must Not Be Named
I am a huge fan of Whitehead's first novel (The Intuitionist) and found his second (John Henry Days) flawed but well worth reading. This brief third work of fiction shares the themes of identity of the first book and the framework of the second. As in "John Henry Days", the story follows a polished, semi-hip, professional black New Yorker as he ventures to the hinterlands (here a small Midwesternish town) for a work assignment. It seems he's a specialist in naming products who has been hired to help the town figure out what its new name (if any) will be. As in "The Intuitionist", the plot serves as a canvas for Whitehead to ruminate on race, history, and identity in America.

However, the story is a little elusive throughout and combined with a the slow pacing, it often feels like Whitehead is just kind of noodling or riffing on his scenes and themes. Delivered in his distinctive prose, with plenty of humor, the story unfolds as a kind of allegory or fable. We learn that the protagonist -- who rather pointedly remains nameless -- used a bandaid to "hide the hurt" of a badly stubbed toe, only to have the wound fester and become badly infected. This mirrors the situation of the town, whose name changed from Freedom (per its founding by former slaves) to Winthrop (per the barbed-wire magnate whose invention brought prosperity to the place), and now, possibly, New Prospera (per the dot com which might revitalize the town) -- all of which mask another, darker, lost name. And ultimately, like the infected toe which must be amputated, the troublesome old name can't stay hidden forever. On yet another level, it's clear that the consultant's smooth exterior and bitter running commentary is a bandaid for his insecure, emotionally closed interior.

Satirizing advertising and consumer culture is more or less like shooting fish in a barrel, and while Whitehead does it well, that's fairly secondary to his central concerns of race, history, and identity. The story wraps up in a rather abrupt, anticlimactic manner -- but that's presumably the point. Perhaps somewhat slight and somewhat obvious, but well worth reading nonetheless.

Unexpectedly original work
Apex did for me what a good work of art should do: present an original idea in a whole new light. I enjoyed the author's theory that words don't always explain or shed light; they hide, obscure and diffuse clarity. I thought the protagonist was well-drawn and his insights were well presented. All in all, a book for people who enjoy words and the people who are employed to use them.

Whitehead's Best Novel Since "The Intuitionist"
Colson Whitehead's "Apex Hides the Hurt: A Novel" is a slender, often witty, fictitious look at marketing and the nature of identity as seen primarily from an Afro-American perspective. Stylistically, it is much closer in tone to his first novel, "The Intuitionist" than to his second, "John Henry Days", replete with much of the same crisp, lyrical prose found in his first novel. As such, I regard "Apex Hides the Hurt: A Novel" as a brilliant example of allegorical fiction, in which Whitehead offers a funny, almost hysterical, satirical exploration of marketing. The hero, an Afro-American marketing expert known as a "nomenclature consultant", must find a suitable name for the town of Winthrop, founded by ex-slaves after the end of the Civil War. His encounters with the town's mayor, leading businessman and other citizens are often both hilarious and bizarre, leading our hero on a seemingly fruitless quest in search of the right name as the suitable replacement for Winthrop. No doubt Whitehead's latest will surely please his growing legion of fans. ... Read more

Product Description
In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York.Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities.

A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories.Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties.

Whitehead’s style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city.There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting.The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms.

The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city.Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Colossus of New York
Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is unlike any travel book I have previously read. Instead of the dull, monotonous reviews of a guidebook, Whitehead presents an insiders take of one of the most complex cities in the world. While traditional guides can be useful, Colossus of New York presents a true New York experience, from transportation difficulties to the affect of weather on the population. By jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, much like Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Whitehead frames New York from many different perspectives. This writing style creates a more wholesome picture of the city, and is much more enjoyable for the reader. With all the different perspectives comes many humorous takes on human actions, such as kids "detonating puddles" in the streets. This book is very entertaining, and is well worth a read.

Go to http://www.supertightstuff.com for more cool stuff.

Very good but not colossal
This little sort of tone poem captures some of the beauty and some of the meanness of New York life. I didn't come away from THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK as being negative toward the city, but even if Mr. Whitehead were, we New Yorkers need our cranks and curmudgeons. It makes us part of who we are, after all.

The free style works MOST of the time. When it doesn't, it really doesn't. (It is no coincidence that the most straight-forward section, the introduction, is the most superb!) THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK doesn't have the lyricism of E.B. White's THIS IS NEW YORK, but it doesn't pretend to want to be like it, anyway. Colson Whitehead's piece is more like Whitman's poetry, as he rambled along the old downtown streets and piers, and recorded his scenes and his feelings about them. Yes, this book could have been greater, but it doesn't take away from the power much of it has. So if you're looking for a history of or guidebook to New York City, this is not the book. But if you're looking for the evocative power of New York, written in a personal, lyrical style, you won't find many better than THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK.

ride the riffs, friend
Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York" is a sort of prose poem to New York.But interestingly enough, the city's identity is almost incidental.New York could be any megalopolis.Whitehead simply uses it as a convenient dumping ground for heaping piles of metaphor, innuendo, and wry pseudo-Freudian slip-riffs.As Whitehead eventually says: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world."He even outdoes Iain Sinclair in this territory because, hey, "Colossus" is actually readable.

Whitehead sculpts sentences here with dazzling, fluid mastery.In sentence after sentence, he manages to surprise you, keeping you in gleeful suspense for that next line, and the next one... And yet it never feels overwrought or exhausting, probably because he pays equal attention to the rhythm of his prose (this is one of those books you can't help reading aloud).

Here's one of my many favorite passages, set in the subway system:

"This is the fabled journey through the underground, folks, and it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.On the opposite track it's a field of greener grass, you gotta beat trains off with a stick.From his secret booth the announcer scares and reassures alternatively.The postures on the platform sag or stiffen appropriately.With a dial controlling the amount of static.What are their rooms like, the men at the microphones.One day the fiscal importunities of the subway announcer's union will be exposed and that will be the end of the hot tubs and lobster, but until then they break out the bubbly.Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder.It's infectious.They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train.The people fall from above into hourglass dunes.Collect like seconds."

I also recommend the audio book edition of this title, as Whitehead himself reads the thing in a dizzying performance.It's like a long shot of aggression with a beat-poetry rhythm and a helping of faux snottiness, all orchestrated to allow us to experience the idea of street-level New York in a manageable package.

Surprisingly negative
The author writes negative comments about every subject, even about subjects he likes.Everything sounds bad in "his New York", as he calls it.I was very disappointed in this book because I really like NY.I read about half the book and threw it in the trash.

Oh, this could have been so good...
Colson Whitehead is a talented writer, as one can easily see in his first two novels. So when I read that he was writing nonfiction about New York, I was thrilled at the prospects. But I don't know what to make of this book.
The majority of the 13 parts have the same structure. Take a place. Write short sentences that explain what you would see at that place. Include actions and thoughts of those characters.
On paper, it sounds awful, and it some ways it is. It is the shortest 176 pages you will ever read, but this style gets highly repetitive. Rather than explaining why he chose these places or what they mean to him, Whitehead includes little about himself. There is quite simply zero insight into the soul of the city.
But the book does have its strong points. Whitehead's scenes are very evocative and I often found myself smilingand nodding at his dead-on descriptions of what I had seen in New York. He notices things about New York that you take for granted. At times, his skills shine through.
But it ultimately felt like reading a good writer's notes before he turns them in to an actual book. I wanted so much more from this book, and based on what is there (and also the wonderful first essay, which is different from all others in structure), I get the feeling it could be there. Everyone has their own version of New York and I'm still waiting to see how Whitehead really sees his hometown. Ultimately it reads like an astute but repetitive poem. Nonetheless, any book that makes me nostalgic about my trips to Port Authority has done one incredible job. ... Read more

Product Description
It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and who dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.

Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. Sabotage is the obvious explanation: It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist, and a colored one at that. But Lila Mae is never wrong.

The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.

In the tradition of Ralph Ellison, Colson Whitehead artfully crosses back and forth over racial, political, and aesthetic borders, and turns just about every contemporary movement, institution, and industry on its head. The Intuitionist's sidesplitting humor is accompanied by a sobering examination of race--how it causes the characters in this story to act and what it causes them to believe about themselves and other people. Beautifully written, wildly imaginative, and starring one of the most lovable heroines of all time, The Intuitionist promises to be one of the most talked-about novels of the year. Amazon.com Review
Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea atthe heart ofColson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. Thesetting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the timeless convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics andsmoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of thevertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevatorinspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.

Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectorsare understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligenceand diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Elevenin the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadlyfree fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using thecontroversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is,after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricistswould do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone onboth sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up totake the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead,"that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft,a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.

Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens thatoutside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readersare taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgentadventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive doubleagents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest revealsthe existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father ofIntuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriouslyentwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for theBlack Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now existswill instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications arehuge andthe denouement is elegantly philosophical.Most impressive ofall is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness,resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that'salways funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of hischaracters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadlyon him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson ... Read more

Customer Reviews (84)

needs an editor
Great ideas for a book, great themes for a book: everday occupation, blue collar workers, life in the big city, government agencies to make (vertical) transportation safer, racism, bias against women.It has a fine, surprises nearing the climax. All good, but the writing wanders painfully between scenes and times and people.Too vague, way to vague, to a pleasurable read

A powerful, energetic read
I came in a little nervous; racial allegories tend to be a little heavy-handed. The Intuitionist had just the right amount of subtlety, and stands up as a straight mystery too. Although the place seems to be some version of New York, the perceived era is always in flux; is it the turn of the century, modern times, or some other time entirely? It raises questions about how much progress we've really made.

The Intuitionist has its share of surprises and twists. Lila Mae is a strong, no nonsense protagonist, and a pleasure to follow into politics' seedy underbelly.

Truly Original
I have been trying to decide whether I have read an odder good novel. That is, I have read plenty of novels that were odd, but not worth a damn. This novel is both odd and really quite splendid. Author Colson Whitehead conjures an alternate universe in which elevator inspectors and engineers matter enormously. It is also an alternate universe in which the civil rights movement never happened; blacks are largely excluded from society's mainstream.

Whitehead writes with so much grace that you absolutely believe in his universe, and so much authority that you don't question why or how the universe got that way.

His heroine, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is an Intuitionist (there are two schools of inspection: empiricism and intuitionism); although Intuitionist methods are poorly understood and mistrusted by many, she has the highest accuracy rate in the department. The novel turns, however, on an incident that seems to point to her first failure; she sets herself to solving the mystery of how she could have been mistaken. In the process, she bumps up against political intrigues between Empiricists and Intuitionists who are battling for control of the elevator inspection guild, competing elevator manufacturing companies, and the mysterious background of the founder of Intuitionism.

The book succeeds in making you feel there is something profound about elevators, which is quite an accomplishment; from a philosophical point of view, Whitehead is less convincing: he challenges the practice of drawing conclusions from visible (or surface) evidence in favor of a mystical intuition. Since such talents don't reliably exist outside the fictive world, we can't really buy the notion that empiricism is not just wrong but racist; that is, we can buy it in a limited way (within the world of the novel)--we just can't take it with us.

Quite an extraordinary book, and beautifully done.

The Invisible Woman
The opening scenes of Colson Whitehead's first novel take place in the gritty, murky, mob-ruled city familiar to crime writers like David Goodis and Chester Himes, a landscape in which bribes are as common as gratuities, nosy reporters are spirited away to have fingers broken and stories canceled, low-life gangsters rifle through apartments while unwary tenants are away. But "The Intuitionist" goes further than its noir precedents, blending in a speculative allegory that flirts with the borders of science fiction and a deft parody of racial tensions that deliberately echoes Ralph Ellison's surreal symbolism. It's a nearly perfect mix of genres.

And did I mention it's about elevator inspectors? In fact, Whitehead may have written the great American novel about vertical transport. The ups and downs of this fictional Gotham are governed by these unsung heroes, who insure that its citizens can attain heights they'd never achieve on their own strength. With power comes corruption, however, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female inspector, is caught in the struggle between two competing factions for dominance of the elevator guild. The Empiricists ply their trade like latter-day phrenologists, taking "nuts-and-bolts" measurements to ascertain the safety and reliability of an elevator; they are "slaves to what they could see," they "look at the skin of things." The upstart Intuitionists--the school to which Watson belongs--peer past the surface of things to feel, or "intuit," the health of an elevator, conducting a sort of symbiotic stress test that the traditionalists regard as "hocus-pocus." The Intuitionists look at the spirit of things.

Whitehead carries this overt racial metaphor into the novel's more realist scenes. Early on, Lila Mae sneaks unnoticed into the guild members' local watering hole to find out why everyone's looking for her, and later, in a sardonically funny episode, she dons a caterer's outfit to attend the guild's annual dinner incognito; she's an invisible woman to those flabby, drunken white men who can't look past "the skin of things." Similarly, the deceased founder of the Intuitionist school, who is regarded as a prophet by its adherents (and who successfully concealed a closely held personal secret), is rumored to have left behind blueprints for the perfect elevator, a "black box" for the next stage of urban living and a utopian answer to physical uplift. Caught in the intrigues surrounding both the search for these alleged blueprints and the control of the city itself, Lila Mae is a modern-day answer to Horatio Alger, an augury of a post-millennial future in which everybody can move up.

Awesome!
Colson Whitehead has become one of my favorite authors. He is innovative and yet keeps the narrative moving in an awesome way. ... Read more

Product Description
Combining the wit of Doonesbury, the profane wisdom of South Park, and the office drone anxieties of Dilbert with the current-events-skewering savvy of Tom Tomorrow, Get Your War On critiques the government’s ambiguous war on terrorism to reveal a surprisingly wide spectrum of public opinion. Since the strip’s initial appearance, Rees’s working stiffs have lambasted everything from the anthrax scare and the Enron debacle to the Office for Homeland Security and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, bravely giving voice to a grieving, angry, and confused citizenry. Rees’s popular website, getyourwaron.com, has received over 8 million hits and has been featured in The New York Times, The Times (London), and LA Weekly, and royalties from this book will be donated to landmine relief efforts in Afghanistan. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

tis better to laugh
Remember back, way back to those early days of post 9-11 America...The atmosphere at the time...
President Bush seizing the moment, all the absurd speeches, ubiquitous yellow ribbons and flags, the first days of "The War On Terror", United We Stand, the lap dog Washington press corp and the whole stinking media behaving as if owned by the state, the words coming out of your co-workers, friends, and family, the push for war and then the wars that followed and disaster that unfolded (and of coarse still is).

This satirical online comic strip gave many Americans just what we needed at the time. The characters featured in "Get Your War On" are mostly office workers drawn in red on a white background and are featured in conversation about the topics of the day. Consistently hilarious dialogue is what the reader is treated to. Most would call it cynical and it is profoundly disillusioned. Looking back now, it doesn't appear so cynical.

I remember the first time I saw this and just laughing my --- off. Clearly like most intelligent comedy this stuff is not for everybody and so calling it divisive and not everybody's cup of tea goes to show there is something maybe worth checking out. You want safe mainstream comedy then watch Jay Leno's suck monologue on the Tonight Show and be all the dumber for it. If you've not enjoyed David Rees's now classic clip-art based comic strip documentation of surreal post 9-11 America it's not too late. Sadly much of the content is still relevant. You can check out GYWO at www.mnftiu.cc but if you want to help make a difference instead of just laughing then buy Rees's books because all royalties go to a charity that clears landmines from Afghanistan.

An Authentic American Voice
I began reading "Get Your War On" shortly after it began.I was a 9/11 iconoclast who felt alone and maybe even a little sociopathic as I coldly observed the victimhood-embracers around me.Reading David Rees' work gave me immense relief.It came from the heart of a fellow spirit; a cry of grief and rage over Bush's insane joke of a war.

Certainly many readers may be put off by Rees' street talk.(I grew up when middle class children seldom heard such words and many weren't printable.)But there is a difference between people who use profanity through ignorance--or hack writers who want an easy laugh--and David Rees.As a writer, his command of American vernacular English impresses me even more than David Mamet does in "Glengarry Glen Ross."Furthermore, his language is entirely suited to his purpose.

I've alway been a great fan of Tom Tomorrow.His use of old advertising images gives an additional level meaning to his work for those who remember the 50's.Although I'm amused by Rees' use of familiar clip art I believe he has the imagination to go much farther.

I urge you to buy and read this book.I, for one, am very eager to see where Rees' talent will take him next.

Comedic genius for a narrow demographic
If you are a twenty-something or younger, lean left politically, don't care whether your cartoons look pretty, and are into irreverent and usually vulgar humor, Get Your War On is the promised land. I find Get Your War On to be gutbustingly funny, but through trial and error I've discovered that receptiveness to the humor is limited by certain demographic realities.

I've tried to share this with my left-leaning sixty something mom and she just couldn't get past the profanity. I tried to share it with some left-leaning twenty somethings and they couldn't get past the clip art. I tried to share it with some politically conservative hipsters and they couldn't get past the politics.

So, sadly, a narrow demographic. But for that demographic, it just doesn't get much better. These are the kinds of WTF? conversations that you had with your friends after 9-11, trying to make sense of a world in which even the good guys seemed nuts. A world in which the question "Why do they hate us?" was answered in record speed with the trite "because of our freedom."

Get Your War On has all the emotions of the post 9-11 world: ambivalence, fear, dread, rah-rahing in spite of oneself, and finally resignation to living in a world that is dominated by religious extremists and misguided actors.

If you're reading this review, you likely know what Get Your War On is all about from looking at the strips at www.mnftiu.cc. So your last remaining question may be what the book's production values are like and whether it is worth buying. The answers are: very good and yes, buy it, the profits go to clearing mines in Afghanistan. Besides, it's more convenient to leave the book on your coffee table instead of a dedicated monitor displaying the comics from the website.

Funny if you're a Democrat, I guess
I laughed at some of these, but alot of them just came across as bitching disguised as humor. I mean, biting humor is supposed to be about humor, not about just flat out hostility towards the butt of your joke.

Welcome to post-9/11 America
"Get Your War On," by David Rees, consists of a series of cartoons in which a cast of office drones discuss life in America during the post-9/11 war on terrorism.Among the topics covered are the military campaign in Afghanistan, the anthrax scare, and the phenomenon of suicide bombing.The tone is satirical, with a very harsh edge.

I found the book sometimes clever, but sometimes it is just unfunny ranting.Much of the humor comes from the pairing of banal white collar images with the often over-the-top, profanity laden dialogue. ... Read more

Product Description
'John Henry Days' is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power. Recognised as one of the novels of 2001, it establishes Colson Whitehead as one of the pre-eminent young American writers of our time.Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend.Over a century later, J. Sutter, a freelance journalist and accomplished expense account abuser, is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first 'John Henry Days' festival.John Henry Days is a riveting portrait of America. Through a patchwork of interweaving histories Colson Whitehead triumphantly reveals how a nation creates its present through the stories it tells of its past. ... Read more

Product Description
In our Autumn 2009 anthology, Colson Whitehead charts the rise to fame of a truth-telling comedian. Stephen O'Connor transports us to a cabin in the woods, where a young woman attempting to finish her dissertation in solitude becomes increasingly convinced she's not alone. Pasha Malla follows a young writer as he explores how tragedy influences art-and how life falls short of it. Marisa Silver tells the tale of three sisters who perceive the truth about their parents through the eyes of some unexpected visitors, and Lydia Davis' solitary narrator acutely details the behavior of three cows who live in a pasture just across the road. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Gift for the Short Story Enthusiast
There is never enough time in the day to get done what needs to get done, let alone devotetime to read the latest NY Times best seller or worse yet Ophrah's Book of the Month. As a overworked professional with limited time, I relish the few minutes it takes to read these short story gems. Whether hidden in my office desk drawer for a few stolen quiet moments of escapism or thrown in my carryon for a plane ride to the 'state du jour' for a business meeting, Electric Literature never fails to disappoint. Anxiously waiting each issue....

Another Great Anthology from Electric Lit!
Electric Literature no. 2 features new and original work from five more incredible authors. Bookended with stories by Colson Whitehead and Lydia Davis, the bulk of the issue does more than measure up to such well known names. Each story is captivating and exciting, and each writer is so vastly different from the next, that it's honestly hard to put it down. This issue also has particularly beautiful cover art, and a really appealing layout with some awesome black and white images. What nice thing for ten bucks! ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from African American Review, published by African American Review on December 22, 2007. The length of the article is 13150 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Passing in the post-race era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead.(Critical essay)
Author: Michele Elam
Publication: African American Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2007
Publisher: African American Review
Volume: 41Issue: 4Page: 749(20)

Article Type: Critical essay

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Colson Whitehead, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2442 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 585 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from African American Review, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 6631 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The urban gothic vision of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999).
Author: Saundra Liggins
Publication: African American Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 40Issue: 2Page: 359(11)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Apex Hides the Hurt, the Intuitionist, John Henry Days. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Apex Hides the Hurt is a 2006 novel by American author Colson Whitehead. The novel follows an unnamed nomenclature consultant who is asked to visit the town of Winthrop, which (it turns out) is considering changing its name. During his visit, the main character is introduced to several citizens attempting to persuade him in favor of their preferred name for the town. The novel has received mostly positive reviews from critics, with few negative comments. In a positive review for American magazine Entertainment Weekly, Jennifer Reese called the book "a blurry satire of American commercialism," adding that "it may not mark the apex of Colson Whitehead's career, but it brims with the author's spiky humor and intelligence." The book was featured among the 100 Most Notable Books of The Year for 2006, as published by The New York Times. Colson Whitehead (born 1969) is an American author. Whitehead was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and wrote for the The Village Voice for two years during his early career, and has since authored three other novels: The Intuitionist, John Henry Days and The Colossus of New York. Since Whitehead began writing, he has had his books and writing reviewed and mentioned in the The New York Times, New York Magazine, Harper's Magazine and has been a recipient of the MacArthur and Whiting Award. The book is set in the fictional town of Winthrop. The protagonist of the book is an unnamed African-American "nomenclature consultant" who has had recent success in branding and selling Apex bandages, which come in multiple colors to better match a broad array of skin tones. The novel begins with the main charac...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=16332528 ... Read more