The Intuitionist - Hardcover

Whitehead, Colson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385492995 ISBN 13: 9780385492997

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1999

Synopsis

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 notebooks from the founder of Intuitionism suddenly appear.

About this title

About the Author

Colson Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969.  His journalism has appeared in Vibe, Spin, Newsday, and The Village Voice, where he was a television columnist.  A graduate of Harvard College, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From the Inside Flap

of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.

Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong.

The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of I

Edition details

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385492995
• ISBN 13: 9780385492997
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 255