![]() ![]() Whitehead has plainly had a good time conjuring up the two-fisted lines that punctuate the story: “He had pushed his luck and now luck’s opposite pushed back,” or “If being a crook were a crime, we’d all be in jail. We spoke to the author about masterminding his own heist, researching a bygone era of Harlem, and how he expects the. Set in the early 1960s, it’s an homage to the era’s hard-boiled crime writers like Chester Himes, Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard. In Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead Masters a New Genre: The Crime Caper. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. His latest, “Harlem Shuffle” (Doubleday, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), is something of a retreat from the seriousness of his recent work. Harlem Shuffle 's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. But it can also be a pigeonhole for a writer who’s built his work around everything from zombies to elevators to postage stamps. Merging stark takes on slavery and Jim Crow with a knack for plot twists, Whitehead has become the standard-bearer for racial reckoning in American fiction. His 2016 novel, “ The Underground Railroad,” won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and 2019’s “The Nickel Boys” won a Pulitzer as well. ![]() ![]() Colson Whitehead has had an unrivaled recent run as an author. ![]()
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