The nostalgia the young have for family things is acutely done: the dependable look of rakes in the basement, or how it feels to gather up your stuff at the chilly end of a day on the beach. Yet in Whitehead's hands this place, reeking of burning sucrose, is the perfect theatre for every anxiety of puberty: monetary, digestive, racial, sexual and criminal. So Reggie throws himself on the mercy of Burger King and Ben gets a job at Jonni Waffle, a wonderful, nauseatingly evoked emporium of American dessert bilge - 'the beginning of my exile from decent people'. Within days of being left in charge, the two brothers have eaten all the frozen dinners they expected would sustain them. To let anything, even money worries, 'interfere with Sag, your shit was seriously amiss'. The place means everything to their parents, and to them. In these cherished, toiled-for houses, Ben and his city friends live summer and adolescence parallel to the rest of the world. Hollywood Literary IP Eye of Sauron, if you’re reading this blog, my vote is for John Henry Days.Whitehead proves himself, among many other things, a poet of the American summer and its aspirations. Surely it’s only a matter of time before someone green-lights a big-budget movie version of Zone One or a moody mystery series based on The Intuitionist. Given Whitehead’s immense critical and commercial success, as well as the wide range of genres he’s worked across in his 20+ years as a novelist, it’s odd that it took till 2020 for us to get a screen adaptation of one of his books. Every summer, Benji escapes to to titular Hamptons town, where a small community of Black professionals have built a community of their own.

Set in 1985, Sag Harbor (a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award) is the coming-of-age story of Benji Cooper, one of the few Black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. This time it’s 2009’s Sag Harbor getting the fancy small screen treatment, with Daniel “Koa” Beaty attached to write the pilot. That’s right, prestige TV-lovin’ Whitehead-heads hot on the heels of Barry Jenkins’ stunning series adaptation of The Underground Railroad, HBO Max has wisely decided to go all-in on Colson.ĭeadline announced earlier today that the streaming service-in conjunction with Boat Rocker Studios and Laurence Fishburne’s Cinema Gypsy Productions-has put into development another limited series adaptation based on a novel by the double Pulitzer Prize winner.

Sag harbor by colson whitehead