YLC Literary Salon: Colson Whitehead in conversation with Myla Goldberg

The Young Lions Conservators gathered at the home of Andrea Olshan to discuss Colson Whitehead's new novel Sag Harbor.  Joined by author Myla Goldberg (Bee Season, Wickett's Remedy), Colson talked about his childhood summers and deciding to finally write an autobiographical novel.   

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the PEN Oakland Award.  The Boston Globe called him, "the best of the new generation of American novelists."  He has also written a book of essays about his home town, The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in Brooklyn.

Colson Whitehead’s most recent novel Sag Harbor follows two teenage brothers during the summer of 1985. In a small enclave of African-American families in the Hamptons, the boys and their friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. At turns mood-shifting and side-splitting, Sag Harbor lithely probes the elusive nature of identify, adolescence, and summer. See Colson Whitehead's tour of Sag Harbor here.