Building a city with words. Multi-perspective storybuilding in Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York" PDF Download
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Author: Ann-Kathrin Latter
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668720533
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 12
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Book Description
Essay from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Frankfurt (Main), language: English, abstract: One might consist that there are as many different versions of New York, as there are people who have laid eyes upon its steel pillars. Some focus more on the promising varieties, while others rather pay attention to the desperate, violent side of the city that lurks underneath the shiny surface of “post-card perfect America”. But if one searches close enough, there is always a unifying commonality that links “the subjective perceptions of the countless people who experience it”. This unifying identity to a variety of collective phenomena, then, is probably what forms the keel and backbone of Colson Whitehead’s “The Colossus of New York”. In his introductory essay “City Limits”, which sets the tone for the entire collection, he writes that the city is full of people, “each haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing”. But even though there are so many different ways to experience the city, that it becomes almost impossible to describe how a single being might observe the city, he sets out to bring as many different approaches to reality together as possible. By combining numerous subjective viewpoints and assessments, he manages to illuminate the city in all its dazzling diversity.
Author: Ann-Kathrin Latter
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668720533
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 12
Get Book Here
Book Description
Essay from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Frankfurt (Main), language: English, abstract: One might consist that there are as many different versions of New York, as there are people who have laid eyes upon its steel pillars. Some focus more on the promising varieties, while others rather pay attention to the desperate, violent side of the city that lurks underneath the shiny surface of “post-card perfect America”. But if one searches close enough, there is always a unifying commonality that links “the subjective perceptions of the countless people who experience it”. This unifying identity to a variety of collective phenomena, then, is probably what forms the keel and backbone of Colson Whitehead’s “The Colossus of New York”. In his introductory essay “City Limits”, which sets the tone for the entire collection, he writes that the city is full of people, “each haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing”. But even though there are so many different ways to experience the city, that it becomes almost impossible to describe how a single being might observe the city, he sets out to bring as many different approaches to reality together as possible. By combining numerous subjective viewpoints and assessments, he manages to illuminate the city in all its dazzling diversity.
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307428281
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the two time Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys recreates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties. Whitehead’s style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting. The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms. The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307486672
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
From the bestselling, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a novel that is "funny and wise and sumptuously written" (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review). Colson Whitehead’s triumphant novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival. It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385545142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). "Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the "Waldorf of Harlem"—and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385529392
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: a hilarious and supremely original novel set in the Hamptons in the 1980s, "a tenderhearted coming-of-age story fused with a sharp look at the intersections of race and class” (The New York Times). Benji Cooper is one of the few Black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of Black professionals have built a world of their own. The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji 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, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Author: Michael Sorkin
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 0865477582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks downtown from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square to his Tribeca office. Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he never ignores his surroundings. Instead, he pays careful, close attention. And in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, he explains what he sees, what he imagines, what he knows—giving us extraordinary access to the layers of history, the feats of engineering and artistry, and the intense social drama that take place along a simple twenty-minute walk.
Author: E. B. White
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174798
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 59
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Book Description
In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0345804325
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Author: Hari Kunzru
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101656190
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The award-winning writer of White Tears and Blue Ruin takes an ultra-contemporary turn with the story of an Indian computer programmer whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer. Lonely and naïve, Arjun spends his days as a lowly assistant virus-tester, pining away for his free-spirited colleague, Christine. Arjun gets laid off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers, and in an act of desperation to keep his job, he releases a mischievous but destructive virus around the globe that has major unintended consequences. As world order unravels, so does Arjun’s sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that reaches Bollywood and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun’s favorite Indian movie.
Author: Ned Sublette
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569765138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
STRONGNamed one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. STRONGWinner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.STRONG STRONGAwarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008. New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, &“rock the city.&” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.
