New hustle: Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead on his heist novel

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Admin

The author talks about his book set among small time crooks in 1960s Harlem, the joy of switching it up - and why he looks up to Stanley Kubrick

Something strange happened the morning after Colson Whitehead finished his forthcoming novel. “I put the book to bed, and then I got up the next morning and Minneapolis was on fire,” he says. It was 26 May 2020, the first of three days of riots last year after the murder of George Floyd. Whitehead had chosen to conclude his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, against the backdrop of the Harlem riot of 1964, which erupted after a 15-year-old black boy, James Powell, was shot dead by police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan. What were the odds that the day after he wrapped up a fictional contemplation of “how we pull ourselves together” in the aftermath of such an incident, there would be another one? As Whitehead himself observes, the coincidence was proof of a point he’s always making: “If you write about fucked up racial shit, wait five minutes and something else will happen.”

Long before our conversation, I’d resolved that I wouldn’t let the topic of race dominate it. For a start, it’s the subject (often the only one) that black writers are always asked to offer opinions about – an architecture of expectation that builds itself up around us. But also, it has never dominated Whitehead’s work, which has ranged in nine previous books over areas as diverse as elevator inspection, the World Series of poker and the zombie apocalypse. And there’s plenty else to talk about. Music: “I’ve done homework, college papers on Ice Cube’s first record and I’m still listening to it now. I’m brought back to other moments in my life when I’ve been writing really hard and Radiohead’s been there, Public Enemy’s been there.” Lockdowns: “I guess the cliche is that writers’ lives didn’t change that much, I’m pretty much sitting right here all day.” Whether he regrets chickening out of accepting Toni Morrison’s invitation to coffee several years ago: “When I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of my idols at conferences, I’m very reserved.”

Legends of the fall: the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Admin

From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for

Lionel Shriver v Cynthia Ozick: hurrah for the new literary beef

Posted on May 18, 2021 by Admin

The books world was growing worryingly well-mannered, but Ozick’s response – in verse – to a bad review by Shriver has revived the fine art of feuding

Whether it is Henry Fielding mocking Samuel Richardson’s painfully virtuous Pamela with his spoof, Shamela; Lillian Hellman suing Mary McCarthy for millions of dollars over her quip that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”; or Norman Mailer knocking Gore Vidal to the floor at a party (“Once again words fail Norman Mailer,” remarked Vidal), there is little more cheering than a good literary feud.

But it’s been a while since a proper throwdown. Richard Ford famously shot an Alice Hoffman book and posted it to her after she wrote a bad review of his book (“It’s not like I shot her,” he told the Guardian in 2003), and spat at The Underground Railway author Colson Whitehead over a similar offence, but Ford has lately refrained from such behaviour. Tom Wolfe’s death in 2018 put paid to his long-running and gloriously vituperative beef with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. (Irving is now the only survivor from that contretemps: does that mean he wins?)

Barry Jenkins: ‘Maybe America has never been great’

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Admin

The Moonlight director on how making his epic TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Underground Railroad compelled him to fully confront the history of slavery, as well as his own damaged childhood

Barry Jenkins first heard the history of the Underground Railroad from a teacher when he was six or seven years old. The school lesson described the loose network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people in the American south escape to free states in the north in the 19th century. Jenkins as a wide-eyed kid imagined an actual railroad, though, secret steam trains thundering under America, built by black superheroes in the dead of night. It was an image, he recalls, that made “anything feel possible”. “My grandfather was a longshoreman,” he says. “He came home every day, in his hard hat and his tool belt, and his thick boots. And I thought, ‘Oh, yes, people like my granddad, they built this underground railroad!’”

That childhood image returned to Jenkins, now 41, when he read an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel about that history, which builds on that same seductive idea. That was in 2016. Both Jenkins and Whitehead were on the edge of career-defining breakthroughs: Jenkins’s film Moonlight was about to be released (and would go on to win the Oscar for best picture) and Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad was about to be published (going on to receive the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize). All this was to come, though, when the pair met. “I was familiar with Colson as an author,” Jenkins told me last week on a screen from his home in Los Angeles. “And once I read his book, I knew for sure I absolutely want this. And I’m not that guy. Usually I’ll read something and I go, well, that might make a great film, and then I’ll just leave it. But this one, it’s all hands on deck, we have to get this.”