Colson Whitehead

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2010

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Colson Whitehead is one of America's most acclaimed novelists. He was the recepient of a MacArthur "genius" grant for his fiction, which includes Apex Hides the Hurt and John Henry Days. His latest novel is Sag Harbor, about the African American beach enclave.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm Amanda from Berkeley, California.
0:02.8	Hi, I'm Chris from Indianapolis.
0:04.8	Hey, I'm Hunter from Philadelphia.
0:07.2	The Sound of Young America is produced independently and supported by listeners like you and me.
0:11.6	You should support the show like I did.
0:13.2	Just visit maximumfund.org slash donate.
0:16.8	I'm Jesse Thorne, live on tape from my house in Los Angeles.
0:20.4	It's the Sound of Young America from maximumfund.org and PRI, public radio, international.
0:30.0	It's the Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorne.
0:35.6	My guest on the program is the acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead.
0:40.0	He is among other things, the winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, the author of several novels,
0:46.0	including Apex Hides the Hurt and most recently SAG Harbor, which is a story about
0:54.4	middle-class African American adolescence in a resort town on the east coast,
1:00.7	enjoying a summer in which almost nothing happens.
1:04.5	Colson Whitehead, welcome to the Sound of Young America.
1:06.4	It's great to have you here.
1:07.2	Hey, how do you think so?
1:08.8	I want to ask you this, it seems like almost like one of the mission statements of this book
1:14.1	is the idea that you can write a compelling book about a group of adolescent characters
1:21.2	going through a summer where they don't stumble into an abandoned mine shaft or like,
1:28.0	find a dead body or get chased by the KKK.
1:31.8	Just none of those things happen in this book and maybe they end up at 105 percent
	...

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