The Intuitionist

As two factions at the Department of Elevator Inspectors--the Empiricists and the Intuitionists--wage war on each other, Intuitionist Lila Mae, the first Black elevator inspector, faces bedlam when an elevator freefalls on her watch and the mysterious notebook from the founder of Intuitionism suddenly appears.

ISBN 0385493002   Pages 256 ISBN13 9780385493000 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc   Weight (grammes) 222 Imprint Anchor Books   Published in New York Format Paperback   Height (mm) 204 Publication date 01 Feb 2005   Width (mm) 133 Library of Congress 98006756   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 813.54   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC21   Alternative ISBN 9780788743238

" The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." --Walter Kirn, "Time" " Ingenious and starkly original...Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, bit if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heaing toward the upper floors." --"The New York Times Book Review" " Magical. . . . The Intuitionist ranks alongside Catch-22, V, The Bluest Eye and other groundbreaking first novels. . . . Whitehead shares Heller's sense of the absurd, Pynchon's operatic expansiveness and Morrison's deconstruction of race and racism." --"San Francisco Chronicle" " The most engaging literary sleuthing you'll read this year. . . . What makes the novel so extraordinary is the ways in which Whitehead plays with notions of race." --"Newsweek" " Whitehead's prose is graceful and often lyrical, and his elevator underworld is a complex, lovingly realized creation." --"The New Yorker" " The Intuitionist is the story of a love affair with the steel and stone, machinery and architecture of the city. It's not a pretty love, but a working-class passion for the stench of humanity that its heroine, Lila Mae Watson, has made her own. But as always with love there is betrayal. This extraordinary novel is the first voice in a powerful chorus to come." --Walter Mosley

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