The New Yorker ran an excerpt and also a piece where I talk about it. HARLEM SHUFFLE was published in the fall of 2021 and is now out in paperback. THE NICKEL BOYS is being made into a film by RaMell Ross. Plus impossible-to-get tickets to a Jackson 5 concert in Madison Square Garden.” Here is the first review, via Kirkus: “It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.” The early info is at OprahDaily: “Here are square deals and double-crosses, hijinks and down-lows, lefty militants, a vanished movie star, police thugs, sugary breakfast cereals, a national bicentennial from hell. Surely this is exciting news, the return of the good gumbo. 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.CROOK MANIFESTO, the second book in the Harlem Trilogy, will be published on July 18th, 2023. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates 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. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey-hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor-engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her.
When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.
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