A Colson Whitehead Starter Pack

Colson Whitehead, whose new crime novel, “Cool Machine,” is out this week, was once named “America’s Storyteller” on the cover of Time magazine, for his mastery of narrative across genres. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he draws readers into the extraordinary worlds of his fiction—Manhattan after a zombie apocalypse, say, or the subterranean tunnels of a literalized Underground Railroad—with a hypnotic insouciance that his friend Jonathan Lethem has compared to that of Rod Serling on “The Twilight Zone.” Disagreements abound over which version of the author is the “real” Colson Whitehead: Gen X genre-bender? Metropolitan flâneur? Grave reckoner with history? But much like New York, his shapeshifting muse, Whitehead’s œuvre has a neighborhood for every taste and temperament. Here are a few places to begin.

“Harlem Shuffle” (2021)

Nineteen-sixties Harlem comes alive in the opener of Whitehead’s crime trilogy, featuring the furniture salesman Ray Carney, whose double life reselling stolen goods illuminates the “churn” of a changing city. It’s a great starting point for New York nostalgists and connoisseurs of audacious heists.

“The Intuitionist” (1999)

Whitehead’s noirish début tells the story of a Black elevator inspector with supernatural gifts, who is framed for an accident amid a sectarian struggle to define the cities of the future. Readers of Ishmael Reed and Thomas Pynchon may enjoy the moody blend of comedy and conspiracy.

“The Underground Railroad” (2016)

This Pulitzer-winning neo-slave narrative reimagines the Underground Railroad as a real subterranean network, in a Sisyphean allegory that illustrates the relentless metamorphoses of white supremacy and Black resistance. Especially for devotees of magical realism, there is much to appreciate in Whitehead’s fabulist reimagining of the American past.

“The Colossus of New York” (2003)

In vignettes that read like errant transmissions from New York’s collective consciousness, Whitehead distills the essence of a place that “multiplies while you’re not looking.” An exercise in urban impressionism that belongs on the bookshelf of any sensitive city dweller—even if you live in Stockholm or São Paolo.

“Sag Harbor” (2009)

Disguised as a coming-of-age comedy about “black boys with beach houses,” Whitehead’s most subtly moving novel is also a meditation on family dysfunction and the transience of youth: “Ask, How long are you out? and a cloud wiped the sun,” he writes. “The question trailed a whiff of autumn.”

Read Lucas’s Profile of Whitehead »