Colson Whitehead

A cool, funny, slyly elegant genre outing that deftly weaves in weightier themes around the edges of a story about crooks and schemers in mid-20th-century New York.

Colson Whitehead has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, along with several other awards celebrating his outstanding novels. Harlem Shuffle is a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally — it's a fabulous novel you must read.

A warm, involving novel

A rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It’s much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.

“A a fiendishly clever romp, a heist novel that’s also a morality play about respectability politics, a family comedy disguised as a noir…Harlem Shuffle reads like a book whose author had enormous fun writing it. The dialogue crackles and sparks; the zippy heist plot twists itself in one showy misdirection after another. Most impressive of all is lovable family-man Ray, whose relentless ambition drives the plot forward while his glib salesman’s patter keeps you guessing about his true intentions. This book is a blast that will make you think, and what could be better than that?”

Another triumph from Pulitzer winner Whitehead

Fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny, Harlem Shuffle is a novel about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel.

Enthralling, cinematic…Whitehead's evocation of early 1960s Harlem — strewn with double-crosses and double standards, broken glass and broken dreams — is irresistible…a valentine to a time and place.

Dazzling…exciting and wise.

It’s a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead’s loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone—‘that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete’—which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce’s Dublin. Don’t be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award.

Whitehead adds another genre to an ever-diversifying portfolio with his first crime novel, and it’s a corker. Ray Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. When the novel begins in 1959, he’s selling mostly used furniture, struggling to escape the legacy of his criminal father. ‘Living taught you,’ Ray believes, ‘that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught.’ Almost. Ray’s ne’erdo-well cousin, Freddie, who’s been luring Ray into hot water since childhood (‘I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,’ is Freddie’s constant refrain) regularly brings Ray the odd piece of jewelry, provenance unknown, which Ray peddles to a dealer downtown, building a stake to invest in his business. ‘There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives . . . a churn of property, and Ray facilitated that churn.’ It works until Freddie suggests Ray as a fence for a jewel heist at the Hotel Theresa (‘the Waldorf of Harlem’), and suddenly the churn produces a potentially disastrous backwash. Following Ray as his business grows and he delicately balances the crooked and straight sides of his life, Whitehead delivers a portrait of Harlem in the early ’60s, culminating with the Harlem Riot of 1964, that is brushed with lovingly etched detail and features a wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy. A triumph on every level.

A spectacularly pleasurable read, and while it is, of course, literary, it’s also a pure, unapologetic crime-fiction page-turner.

Harlem Shuffle is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York.

An American master.

Not a moment is wasted, and for someone who writes as vividly as Whitehead, there’s also a graceful economy here. He uses words carefully, as if he doesn’t want them to get in the way of the truth he’s excavating.

The Nickel Boys often feels like Whitehead’s conversation with both the idealistic forerunners of the civil rights generation and…the woke youth of today.

THE NICKEL BOYS is in conversation with works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and especially Martin Luther King.... It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment.

Propulsive and gorgeous and completely devastating.

The Nickel Boys is a chilling, masterful novel that explores the depths of evil and the resilience of the human spirit. Whitehead's prose is dazzling, and the narrative's nimble twist is a swift kick to the solar plexus.

[A] powerful narrative...grips us from the very first line.

The Nickel Boys' is a literary achievement. Will Colson Whitehead win another Pulitzer? “The Nickel Boys” is straight-ahead realism, distinguished by its clarity and its open conversation with other black writers: It quotes from or evokes the work of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and more. Whitehead has made an overt bid to stand in their company – to write a novel that’s memorable, and teachable, for years to come. “The Nickel Boys” is its fulfillment.

Stellar…heartbreaking...a beautiful, unforgettable young hero who walks right off the page and into your heart…If you have been thinking you should read Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys is the perfect place to start.

A tense, nervy performance, even more rigorously controlled than its predecessor. The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into the water. Every chapter hits its marks.

America's storyteller...A book that will further cement his place in the pantheon of influential American writers.

Spry and animated and animated and seamed with dark humor, true to the irrepressible curiosity of its teenage protagonists...the control and craft of THE NICKEL BOYS demonstrate the versatile gifts of a writer who is rounding into mastery....[Whitehead] has made himself one of the finest novelists in America.

I haven’t been as simultaneously moved and entertained by a book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself.

Perfectly balances the realism of its subject with fabulist touches that render it freshly illuminating.

Whitehead’s novel unflinchingly turns our attention to the foundations of the America we know now.

[An] ingenious novel. . . . A successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America’s defining values.

Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers. . . . [The Underground Railroad] offers many testaments to Whitehead’s considerable talents and examines a deeply relevant and disturbing period of American history.

Singular, utterly riveting. . . . You’ll be shaken and stunned by Whitehead’s imaginative brilliance. . . . The Underground Railroad is a book both timeless and timely. It is a book for now; it is a book that is necessary.

Brilliant. . . . An instant classic that makes vivid the darkest, most horrific corners of America’s history of brutality against black people.

Masterful, urgent. . . . One of the finest novels written about our country’s still unabsolved original sin.

[Whitehead] is the best living American novelist.

The Underground Railroad enters the pantheon of . . . the Great American Novels. . . . A wonderful reminder of what great literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challenge us, and leave us changed by the end.

Colson Whitehead’s book blends the fanciful and the horrific, the deeply emotional and the coolly intellectual. What he comes up with is an American masterpiece.

A brilliant reimagining of antebellum America.

The Underground Railroad is inquiring into the very soul of American democracy. . . . A stirring exploration of the American experiment.

Electrifying. . . . Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember.

Whitehead’s best work and an important American novel.

Potent. . . . Devastating. . . . Essential.

A triumph.

Stunningly daring.

An American masterpiece.

Terrific.

Kept me up at night, had my heart in my throat, almost afraid to turn the next page. Get it, then get another copy for someone you know because you are definitely going to want to talk about it once you read that heart-stopping last page.

[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift… [S]urreal elements inject the narrative with a mythic dimension… One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fable-like allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power…. The harrowing tale he tells here is the back story to the injustices African-Americans and immigrants continue to suffer today, but the back story only in the sense, as Faulkner put it, that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’… [H]e memorializes the yearning for freedom that spurs one generation after another to persevere in the search for justice — despite threats and intimidation, despite reversals and efforts to turn back the clock. He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.

[T]hink Toni Morrison (Beloved), Alex Haley (Roots); think 12 Years a Slave. Now here comes Colson Whitehead and with an extraordinary new take… an electrifying novel … a great adventure tale, teeming with memorable characters. At times, it's almost too sad to bear, but you'll keep reading, inspired by Cora and all the others who struggled to keep their humanity alive while trapped in America's ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember.

[M]asterful, urgent… The vivid, heart-clutching narrative of [Cora’s] escape takes care of its own implications about the enormity that is America slavery…a major American novelist… A tragic, disturbing necessity: that describes the feeling of The Underground Railroad... The result is one of the finest novels written about our country’s still unabsolved original sin.

Far and away the most anticipated literary novel of the year, The Underground Railroad marks a new triumph for Whitehead… The MacArthur “genius” has nimbly explored America’s racial consciousness — and more — with an exhilarating blend of comedy, history, horror and speculative fiction. In this new book, though, those elements are choreographed as never before. The soaring arias of cleverness he’s known for have been modulated in these pages. The result is a book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era.

Ingenious… Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Astonishing. . . . Witty. . . . Tom Wolfe crossed with Tom Pynchon.

Hilarious. . .. Equal parts philosophical and farcical.

A zombie story with brains. . . . [Whitehead is a] certifiably hip writer who can spin gore into macabre poetry.

Whitehead writes with economy, texture and punch. . . . A cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise.

He can write sentences like nobody’s business, and the deepest satisfaction in this book full of them is his crafty turn of phrase.

No one writes with more acrobatic imagination and good humor about the complexities of race in America than Colson Whitehead.