The Fiction Advocate is totally crushing on a couple of contemporary authors. One of them is Colson Whitehead. In addition to being a kick-ass novelist (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Colossus of New York, Apex Hides the Hurt, and now Sag Harbor) the man CANNOT SAY ANYTHING THAT ISN’T FICTION. Check out his op-ed pieces, where he devises a great fictional premise for dealing with real-world issues, and he NEVER BLINKS from his fictional set-ups.
Colson Whitehead vs. Brooklyn Writers
Colson Whitehead vs. James Wood
Colson Whitehead vs. Fake Memoirs
Fiction that serves as non-fiction… it’s enough to make us swoon!
No wonder Colson Whitehead is snappy when interviewers ask him endless variations on the question, “So… just how NON-FICTIONAL is your FICTIONAL WORK?” (Those interviewers can suck it, by the way. The Fiction Advocate is watching you.)
Read this Q & A with the New Yorker blog and see how many times Colson Whitehead responds with veiled hostility (and humor) to the presumption that his fiction is necessarily autobiographical.
YOU TELL’ EM, COLSON!!
[…] warmongering. Cole’s work is a stylish provocation, a cross between Colson Whitehead’s op-ed stunt pieces and Christopher Hitchens’ sage punditry. No one else writes such exciting Internet content and […]
[…] marks two and a half years that I have officially been crushing on Colson […]