Sag Harbor; A Novel

New York: Doubleday, 2009. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Tracy Morford (Jacket Photograph), Virginia Norey. [10], 273, [5] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Minor DJ wear. Signed by the author sticker on the front cover. Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad, for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Whitehead has produced ten book-length works—eight novels and two non-fiction works. His books are The Intuitionist; John Henry Days; The Colossus of New York; Apex Hides the Hurt; Sag Harbor; Zone One, a New York Times bestseller; The Underground Railroad, which earned a National Book Award for Fiction; The Nickel Boys; and Harlem Shuffle. Esquire magazine named The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium". Novelist John Updike called Whitehead "The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead." Whitehead's non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. Whitehead has taught at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, and Wesleyan University. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College and the University of Wyoming. The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in America. The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school, when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria, his social doom is sealed for the next four years. 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. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he's just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is. There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He 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 of '85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer. In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead, using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention, lithely probes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.