Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2006
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
When the town of Winthrop needed a new name for their town, they did what anyone would do—they hired a consultant.
The protagonist of Apex Hides The Hurt is a nomenclature consultant. If you want just the right name for your new product, be it automobile or antidepressant, sneaker or spoon, he’s the man to get the job done. Wardrobe lack pizzazz? Come to the Outfit Outlet. Always the wallflower at social gatherings? Try Loquacia.
Apex Hides The Hurt brilliantly and wryly satirizes our contemporary culture, where memory and history are subsumed by the tides of marketing.
"Whitehead disappoints in this intriguingly conceived but static tale of a small town with an identity crisis." - PW.
"In spare and evocative prose, Whitehead does Shakespeare one better: What's in a name, and how does our identity relate to our own sense of who we are? For serious fiction collections in academic and public libraries." - Library Journal.
"Cultural insight, conceptual ingenuity and cutting-edge humor distinguish the third novel by a New York writer who never fails to engage and intrigue." - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan.
After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.
His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.
John Henry Days followed in 2001, an investigation of the steel-driving man of American folklore. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel received the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
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