Colson Whitehead

In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in-or spent time-in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city's inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations,...

"It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown, furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him until he needs...

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

From the bestselling, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a novel that is "funny and wise and sumptuously written" (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review).

Colson Whitehead’s triumphant novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him....

In a marvelous debut novel that has been compared to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Colson Whitehead has created a strangely skewed world of elevators and the people who control their ups and downs. Lila Mae Watson-the first black female inspector in the world's tallest city-has the highest performance rating of anyone in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This upsets her superiors, because Lila is an Intuitionist:...

"In THE NOBLE HUSTLE Colson Whitehead does for participatory journalism what he did for zombie novels in ZONE ONE: Take one literary genius, add $10,000 and a seat at the World Series of Poker, and stir. On one level, Colson Whitehead's THE NOBLE HUSTLE is a familiar species of participatory journalism - a longtime neighborhood poker player, Colson was given a $10,000 stake and an assignment from the online ESPN offshoot Grantland to see how far he...