--- title: Colson Whitehead on Summer Reading | TIME description: Colson Whitehead -- the author of the critically acclaimed new coming-of-age novel 'Sag Harbor' -- talks to Katherine Lanpher about what he's reading this summer canonical: https://time.com/video/6l4aWhpr/ og:title: Colson Whitehead on Summer Reading og:description: Colson Whitehead -- the author of the critically acclaimed new coming-of-age novel 'Sag Harbor' -- talks to Katherine Lanpher about what he's reading this summer og:url: https://time.com/video/6l4aWhpr/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/6l4aWhpr/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Colson Whitehead on Summer Reading twitter:description: Colson Whitehead -- the author of the critically acclaimed new coming-of-age novel 'Sag Harbor' -- talks to Katherine Lanpher about what he's reading this summer twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/6l4aWhpr/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Colson Whitehead on Summer Reading > Sponsored content. 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Colson Whitehead -- the author of the critically acclaimed new coming-of-age novel 'Sag Harbor' -- talks to Katherine Lanpher about what he's reading this summer_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:11 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Colson Whitehead on Reading and Writing](/video/2mxG7ivn/) ### Colson Whitehead on Reading and Writing [Colson Whitehead’s Favorite Pop Culture Zombies](/video/NDDTV9dO/) ### Colson Whitehead’s Favorite Pop Culture Zombies [Summer Reading](/video/5arH1ZSd/) ### Summer Reading --- ## Transcript [00:00] >>It took Colson Whitehead three novels to get around [00:04] to the first- person, coming- of- age tale that most [00:07] writers start with. Instead, Whitehead kicked off his [00:10] career with richly imagined tales-- such as his debut [00:13] novel, The Intuitinist, a noir- ish mystery set in [00:18] still- segregated New York, or John Henry Days, his [00:21] spin on the legendary steel- driving man, that was a [00:24] finalist for a Pulitzer. But when Whitehead does get [00:27] around to his coming- of- age tale and all the requisite [00:31] embarrassments and agonies, he sets it in the [00:34] summer. His fourth novel, Sag Harbor, is based on his [00:37] own summers spent at the resort areas carved out by [00:40] the black community in Long Island's Sag Harbor. His [00:44] pick for summer reading is Ann Carson's [00:47] Autobiography of Red. Tell us a little bit about who [00:50] Ann Carson is. I think of her as a writer's writer. [00:53] >>Yeah. I mean, I'm a fiction writer, and I don't really [00:56] read a lot of poetry. But certain names, you know, [00:59] contemporary poets keep coming up and up, and so [01:01] Ann Carson was one. [01:03] >>In fact, Autobiography of Red is her contemporary [01:06] retelling of the myth of Herakles and Geryon. [01:09] >>I was not familiar with the myth, but apparently, [01:12] one of Hercules' labors, his ten labors, is to steal [01:17] a cattle of Geryon and kill him, which he does. [01:21] And so Geryon in the myth, [ unk ] [01:26] and Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red, is a red [01:29] monsters with wings. And he walks around. He goes to [01:32] school, but he's a monster like we're all sort of [01:35] monsters sometimes, you know. And so he's a fantastic [01:38] creature in a way that we're all fantastic creatures in a [01:40] way. [01:41] >>One of the things that struck me is that there's even [01:43] the line from her retelling of this tale in which she says, [01:47] " Everyday life as a red- winged monster had [01:49] accommodated him to ridicule ." And I thought, " Not a [01:53] bad encapsulation of adolescence ." [01:55] >>No. Yeah, I mean, the book is following him in his [01:58] teenage years, his early twenties. And I think, when I [02:01] was asked to pick a summer book-- because I've [02:04] been talking about Sag Harbor so much and my take [02:06] on adolescence, I thought [02:10] of Ann Carson's sort of off- kilter take on adolescence, [02:14] which is the story of this red monster. [02:16] >>What distinguishes summer reading to winter [02:20] reading theme? [02:20] >>When I was coming here, I was thinking of-- you [02:23] know, why did I pick Autobiography [02:27] of Red? It's not your sort of traditional summer choice. [02:31] And I was thinking of the trip I took in '94 when I was [02:34] like trying to find myself. I went to Brazil for six weeks. [02:37] I never really travelled before, never by myself, and [02:41] the book I bought was Ulysses by James Joyce. And so [02:45] I had like this canvass bag, and I was like going [02:47] through all these beach towns. And I had-- I didn't [02:50] know that it was like their winter, and so all the beach [02:52] towns were empty. You know, they're 60 degrees. It [02:55] was just me like in my cut- off jeans. And I was in the [02:58] beach, sort of feeling miserable, trying to speak [03:00] Portuguese; and I was really a good traveler, and just [03:03] being Ulysses. When I think back of some of my more [03:08] enjoyable reading experiences in summer, I think of [03:10] like strange big boats like Gravity's Rainbow and [03:13] Ulysses, books that really sort of changed my idea of [03:15] like what it is to be a writer. [03:17] >>I wanna get back to the Ann Carson retelling this [03:19] myth-- [03:19] >>Sure. [03:20] >>because it's also in its way a story of survival [03:24] through art. And talk about how that often [03:28] for your own adolescence and for the adolescent you [03:31] were writing about. [03:33] >>Yeah. Autobiography of the [ unk ] is our little [03:37] monster's collection of photographs, and so [03:40] photography becomes the way of his achieving mastery [03:43] over his world. [03:44] >>In the Ann Carson-- [03:45] >>In the Ann Carson book. [03:45] >>Yes. Yes. [03:46] >>For me, reading, writing has always been a sort of [03:50] refuge in a way of, you know, taking [ unk ] to [03:54] the world and figuring things out. With my earlier [03:56] novels, I start off of intellectual [04:02] proposition-- for example, what if we-- how do you [04:05] update the John Henry myth for the information age? [04:09] And that's also a way-- it's also a sort of parallel with [04:12] Ulysses and Autobiography of Red because I'm taking [04:15] this sort of folklore figure and trying to figure out how it [04:19] works in the modern world. With Sag Harbor, I think I [04:22] was trying to figure out how people really were and not [04:25] so much this sort of intellectual paradigm or system. [04:29] >>You mentioned that the information age-- you have [04:32] a broad Twitter following, you're pretty adept [04:36] at handling the online technology these days. But 140 [04:41] characters for a tweet versus a book? How are books [04:42] gonna survive? Come on, man. What are you doing? [04:47] >>Well, yeah, they're still completely different. I mean, [04:49] you know, I started Twittering-- it's very weird [04:53] because I don't like people, and it's a very sort of a-- [04:59] >>You heard it here first. [04:59] >>Yeah, so actually, I'm there with other people, and [05:01] there's no sort of buffer-- I'm all about buffers. But [05:03] definitely, since I'm in between projects, it's a nice way [05:06] to sort of send out thing I would normally say to my [05:10] cat, and send them out to the Twitter world. And then [05:13] other people can meow back, and it's been sort of fun. [05:16] >>So in other words, it's not [ unk ] of another Colson [05:19] Whitehead novel? [05:19] >>No. No. It's one of the other, and when the [05:24] other comes, I'll be a little quieter. [05:25] >>All right. Have a good summer. [05:27] >>That's-- Thanks. 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