In 2008, the future Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead published “The Gangsters,” a vivid short story about a teen-age boy’s adventurous summer with friends on Long Island during the mid-eighties. (The story was adapted from “Sag Harbor,” the novel published by Whitehead the following year.) Whitehead’s tale explores the mind-set of teens first experiencing the pull of adulthood yet unwilling to let go of the exhilarating rush of adolescence. “We were copying our parents, who had been beating each other up, eating each other’s barbecue, chasing each other down the hacked-out footpaths to the beach, thirty years earlier, under the same sky,” he writes. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses.” It’s an evocative look at race, class, and the complexities of youthful brotherhood in suburban America.
This week, we’re bringing you a selection of summer pieces—our version of beach reading. In “Off Diamond Head,” William Finnegan reflects on his days surfing in Honolulu as a young teen. (“I began to learn the tricky, fast, shallow sections, and the soft spots where a quick cutback was needed to keep a ride going. Even on a waist-high, blown-out day, it was possible to milk certain waves for long, improvised, thoroughly satisfying rides.”) In “Loggerheads,” David Sedaris shares his childhood obsession with sea turtles. In “Unnatural Selection,” Elizabeth Kolbert examines attempts to save the coral reefs protecting coastlines from erosion. Finally, in “The Swimmer,” from 1964, John Cheever chronicles an afternoon (really, a bit of a lifetime) spent traversing his middle-class suburb via his neighbors’ back-yard pool parties: “His life was not confining, and the delight he took in this thought could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. In his mind he saw, with a cartographer’s eye, a string of swimming pools, a quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.”
—David Remnick
From The New Yorker’s Archive
Fiction
“The Gangsters”
“According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses.”
By Colson Whitehead | December 22 & 29, 2008
Personal History
Off Diamond Head
To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii.
By William Finnegan | June 1, 2015
Annals of Science
Unnatural Selection
What will it take to save the world’s reefs and forests?
By Elizabeth Kolbert | April 18, 2016
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Fiction
“The Swimmer”
“Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny.”
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