John Henry Days
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of ‘The Underground Railroad’, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
‘John Henry Days’ is a novel of extraordinary scope and mythic power. It established Colson Whitehead as a pre-eminent American writer of our time.
Building the railways that made America, John Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after competing against a steam drill in a battle of endurance. The story of his death made him a legend.
Over a century later, J. Sutter, a freelance journalist and accomplished expense account abuser, is sent to West Virginia to cover the launch of a new postage stamp at the first 'John Henry Days' festival.
John Henry Days is a work of extraordinary scope, revealing how a nation creates its present through the stories it tells of its past.
Reviews
‘Funny and wise and sumptuously written.’ Jonathan Franzen
'Blithely gifted…an ambitious, finely chiselled work.' John Updike
'Witty, acerbic and immensely compelling …Whitehead is a first-rate writer.’ Financial Times
' Hugely talented…Colson Whitehead has produced an immensely rich, many stranded novel. The writing is inspired on every page. Just Wonderful! One of my books of the year.' Time Out
'Such is the buoyancy of his talent, and the protean assuredness of his prose, that the result is controlled, poignant, wittily observed and often gleefully comic.' Guardian
'Dazzling … It may be nothing new to suggest that history is fiction; but the pleasure of reading this ingenious patchwork lies in how it reminds us of the vitality of those fictions.' Independent on Sunday
About the author
Colson Whitehead was born in New York in1969 and graduated from Harvard in 1991. His first novel, THE INTUITIONIST. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Death knells toll alike at the dawn of the machine age and the digital age, proclaiming an exhausted general collapse in this impressive, multilayered second novel by Whitehead (The Intuitionist). Seizing on the story of American folk hero John Henry, the black railroad worker who beat a steam drill in a one-on-one contest and died in the act, Whitehead juxtaposes it with the soulless saga of 21st-century freelance writer J. Sutter, member of a junketeering tribe whose mores and speech are rendered with anthropological enthusiasm. J. and his fellow junketeers notably Dave Brown, a former gonzo Rolling Stone journalist whose best days were in the late '60s, and jittery One Eye, whose paranoia infects J. descend on Talcott, W.Va., John Henry's supposed resting ground, to report on the U.S. Postal Service's release of a commemorative John Henry stamp. They coincide there with Pamela Street, the daughter of a deceased John Henry obsessive who opened a mad private museum in Harlem to celebrate the man, and Alphonse Miggs, a collector specializing in train stamps, whose secret agenda involves his newly purchased pistol. The debased countercultural cynicism of the junketeers, J.'s compulsive collection of factoids and receipts to fuel the print media machine, and the warped nostalgic longings of Pamela and Alphonse are funneled into a tornado-like narrative storm, bits and pieces of the John Henry myth spinning in the updraft. Whitehead (recipient of a 2000 Whiting Writers' Award) has the early DeLillo's sense for the sinister underside of Americana, combined with historical consciousness of the African-American middle-class in the post civil rights era. Smart, learned and soaringly ambitious, his second novel consolidates his position as one of the leading writers of serious fiction of his generation.
