"NO ONE WRITES WITH MORE ACROBATIC IMAGINATION AND GOOD HUMOR ABOUT THE COMPLEXITIES OF RACE IN AMERICA": FIRST EDITION OF SAG HARBOR, SIGNED BY COLSON WHITEHEAD

WHITEHEAD, Colson. Sag Harbor. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Octavo, original tan and blue paper boards, cartographic endpapers, original dust jacket. $250.

First edition of Whitehead's fourth novel, a Pen/Faulkner Award finalist, affirming his "David Foster Wallace-esque knack for… deadpan slacker wit," signed on the title page by Whitehead.

Sag Harbor, Whitehead's lyrical and "memoiristic fourth novel," is a humorous coming-of-age story about a young black 15-year-old whose family summers in Long Island every year (New York Times). Here "Whitehead proves himself, among many other things, a poet of the American summer and its aspirations… In his elegiac, spirited prose there are echoes of Melville, one of the first to write about Sag, and others, too: Thurber's ability to celebrate a troubled family through satire, and Cheever's melancholy geography of class" (Guardian). "No one writes with more acrobatic imagination and good humor about the complexities of race in America than Whitehead" (Washington Post). Throughout, he also displays his "David Foster Wallace-esque knack for punctuating meticulously figurative constructions with deadpan slacker wit" (Los Angeles Times).

In fine condition.