Colson Whitehead

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  • Whitehead, Colson: Apex Hides the Hurt
    Apex Hides the Hurt
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 1400031265 (1-4000-3126-5)
    Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    From the MacArthur and Whiting Awardwinning author of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist comes a new, brisk, comic tour de force about identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry

    When the citizens of Winthrop needed a new name for their town, they did what anyone would dothey hired a consultant.

    The protagonist of Apex Hides the Hurt is a nomenclature consultant. If you want just the right name for your new product, whether it be automobile or antidepressant, sneaker or spoon, hes the man to get the job done. Wardrobe lack pizzazz? Come to the Outfit Outlet. Always the wallflower at social gatherings? Try Loquacia.

    And of course, whenever you take a fall, reach for Apex, because Apex Hides the Hurt. Apex is his crowning achievement, the multicultural bandage that has revolutionized the adhesive bandage industry. Flesh-colored be damnedno matter what your skin tone isApex will match it, or your money back.

    After leaving his job (following a mysterious misfortune), his expertise is called upon by the town of Winthrop. Once there, he meets the town council, who will try to sway his opinion over the coming days.

    Lucky Aberdeen, the millionaire software pioneer and hometown-boy-made-good, wants the name changed to something that will reflect the towns capitalist aspirations, attracting new businesses and revitalizing the community. Who could argue with that?

    Albie Winthrop, beloved son of the towns aristocracy, thinks Winthrop is a perfectly good name, and cant imagine what the fuss is about.

    Regina Goode, the mayor, is a descendent of the black settlers who founded the town, and has her own secret agenda for what the name should be.

    Our expert must decide the outcome, with all its implications for the towns future. Which name will he choose? Or perhaps he will devise his own? And whats with his limp, anyway?

    Apex Hides the Hurt brilliantly and wryly satirizes our contemporary culture, where memory and history are subsumed by the tides of marketing. [via]

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  • The Colossus of New York : A City in 13 Parts
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 1400031249 (1-4000-3124-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    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 inor spent timein the greatest of American cities.

    A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the citys 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.

    Whiteheads 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. [via]

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  • Get Your War on
    by David Rees, Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 188712876X (1-887128-76-X)
    Softcover, Soft Skull Pr

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    Book summary:

    David Rees' Get Your War On is already a cult Web site and it looks set to continue to garner even more fans with the release of this excellent 100 page paperback collection. Subverting the traditional three-frame cartoon format by its use of ubiquitous static clip-art coupled with some of the harshest, bile-filled satire around, Rees has produced an absolute winner. Each cartoon manages to portray the anger, disillusion, cynicism, intelligence and stupidity of our times and Rees's outrage, humanity and perspicacity is as heart-warming as it is hilarious. Caustic, derisive, direct comedy, Get Your War On is essential reading for these mad, bad times. --George Bowman [via]

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  • Whitehead, Colson: The Intuitionist
    The Intuitionist
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 1862072361 (1-86207-236-1)
    Softcover, Granta Books

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    Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of the vertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.

    Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take 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 that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson [via]

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  • Whitehead, Colson: John Henry Days : A Novel
    John Henry Days
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 1841155705 (1-84115-570-5)
    Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers Limited

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    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 [via]

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German

  • Colson Whitehead: Apex
    Apex
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 3446208704 (3-446-20870-4)
    Softcover

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  • John Henry Days
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 3446204695 (3-446-20469-5)
    Softcover

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    Book summary:

    Talcott ist ein ziemlich verschlafenes Nest in West Virginia, in dem heute so gut wie gar nichts los ist. Bis der Fremdenverkehrsverband sich an die glorreichen Zeiten der Stadt im 19. Jahrhundert erinnert, als Talcott ein wichtiges Zentrum des Eisenbahnbooms in Amerika war. Damals wurde die Verbindungslinie von West Virginia an die Ostküste, die berühmte "Connection", gebaut, wobei etliche Tunnels millimeterweise von Menschenhand durch die Berge getrieben werden mussten. Einer der schwarzen Bohrhauer, die diese unmenschliche Arbeit verrichten mussten, war der legendäre John Henry. Von ihm geht die Sage, er habe einen Wettstreit im Schienenlegen gegen einen Dampfhammer gewonnen, was er allerdings am Ende mit seinem Leben bezahlte. Ihm zu Ehren, und um den Ruf der Gegend wieder ein bisschen aufzumöbeln, soll anlässlich der John-Henry-Festtage eine Sondermarke des US Postal Service vorgestellt werden.

    Zu der Horde von Medienvertretern, die nach Talcott geladen werden, um dieses Ereignis angemessen zu würdigen, gehört auch J. Sutter, ein typischer Vertreter des schreibenden Schnorrertums: ein abgebrühter Spesenritter, dessen journalistisches Interesse an John Henry oder Talcott nicht weiter reicht als die Werbegeschenke der Auftraggeber und die saftigen Rippchen vom Gratisbuffet. Der einzige Ergeiz, den dieser Reporter von der traurigen Gestalt überhaupt noch entwickeln kann, ist ein neuer Schnorr-Rekord: J. Sutter will sich umsonst durchfressen, und zwar so lang es irgendwie geht. Ungefährlich ist das nicht, denn Sutters Vorgänger, der Ähnliches versuchte, verlor dabei erst seine Akkreditierung und schließlich den Verstand.

    Aus dem eigenwilligen Kontrast zwischen der schwarzen Heldenfigur John Henry, dessen Mythos in Amerika jedes Schulkind kennt, und seinem ganz und gar unheldenhaften Nachfahren J. Sutter, entwickelt Colson Whitehead ein fassettenreiches Panorama amerikanischer Befindlichkeiten, in dessen Zentrum die unstillbare fatale Sucht nach dem Besonderen und Nichtalltäglichen, nach dem Rekord und der Sensation ständig zu spüren ist. Dabei geht es letztlich immer auch um die Hoffnung, die Banalität der eigenen Existenz überwinden zu können.

    Zugleich liest sich Whiteheads intelligenter und variantenreich erzählter Roman als pointierte und witzige Satire der amerikanischen Medien- und Spektakelkultur, die längst nicht mehr nur in den USA zu finden ist. Ließ schon der eigenwillige Erstling des jungen afroamerikanischen Autors, The Intutionist, einiges von dessen kreativer Fantasie und literarischem Potenzial erkennen, so erweist sich Colson Whitehead mit John Henry Days endgültig als ambitionierter Erzähler mit einem beachtlichen stilistischen Repertoire, dem man auch angesichts des Unterhaltungswertes seiner Prosa einige Übertreibungen gern verzeiht. --Peter Schneck [via]

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  • Der Koloß von New York
    by Colson Whitehead
    ISBN 3446205926 (3-446-20592-6)
    Softcover

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