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Title details for Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead - Wait list

Sag Harbor

A Novel

by Colson Whitehead
Mirron Willis
Audiobook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 3 weeks
Place a hold Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 3 weeks
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    April 28, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415960578
      • File size: 325282 KB
      • Duration: 11:17:40

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Lexile® Measure: 1000
    • Text Difficulty: 5-7

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Picture a newly painted white beach cottage under an azure sky in mid-July. Perfect, right? And so are this delightful novel about an adolescent's perennial summer haven in the Hamptons and the buoyant, irresistible narration supplied by Mirron Willis. Willis easily surmounts the trickiest requirement of the production--the tone of an adult voicing a teenager's perspective. How? Willis sounds just like an adult whose imagination returns to him to his youth as he describes what he experienced with all the same wonder, insecurity, and hopefulness he had then. On top of all that, Willis is alive to Whitehead's hilarity as he recounts young Benji's reactions to all the small and large issues that preoccupied him that summer of 1985--from race and coolness to braces and girls, siblings and peers, and the foreign universe in which adults reside. M.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 23, 2009
      In what Whitehead describes as his “Autobiographical Fourth Novel” (as opposed to the more usual autobiographical first novel), the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Henry Days
      explores the in-between space of adolescence through one boy's summer in a predominantly black Long Island neighborhood. Benji and Reggie, brothers so closely knit that many mistake them for twins, have been coming out to Sag Harbor for as long as they can remember. For Benji, each three-month stay at Sag is a chance to catch up with friends he doesn't see the rest of the year, and to escape the social awkwardness that comes with a bad afro, reading Fangoria
      , and being the rare African-American student at an exclusive Manhattan prep school. As he and Reggie develop separate identities and confront new factors like girls, part-time jobs and car-ownership, Benji struggles to adapt to circumstances that could see him joining the ranks of “Those Who Don't Come Out Anymore.” Benji's funny and touching story progresses leisurely toward Labor Day, but his reflections on what's gone before provide a roadmap to what comes later, resolving social conflicts that, at least this year, have yet to explode.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:1000
  • Text Difficulty:5-7

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