The novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. In this portrait of the greatest of cities, Colson Whitehead conveys with immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home. His style, a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories, is as multi-layered and multifarious as New York itself. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive there for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms.

The Colossus of New York : A City in Thirteen Parts

WHITEHEAD,COLSON

Travel

Fourth Estate

From the author of the Man Booker longlisted The Underground Railroad\nBenji spends most of the year as one of the only black kids at an elite prep school in Manhattan, going to roller disco bar mitzvahs, desperately trying to find his place in the social hierarchy.\nThen he spends his summers in the African-American community of Sag Harbor on Long Island, and is just as confused. He's way behind on the latest handshakes, baffled by new slang, and his attempts to be cool and meet girls are constantly thwarted by his extremely awkward inner geek, braces and a badly cut Afro.\nIt's the summer of 1985 and Benji is determined that this is the summer when things will change and he'll fit in. For starters, he'll be reinvented as 'Ben'. When that doesn't catch on, it's another summer of the perpetual mortification that is teenage existence.

Sag Harbor

Literature & Fiction

United States

Vintage

From the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad: a tender, hilarious, and supremely original novel about coming-of-age in the 80s. Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages.

Reference

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong… At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory.

Zone One

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Anchor

#1 New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the National Book Award • Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize One of the Best books of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, HuffPost, Esquire, Minneapolis Star Tribune Look for Whitehead’s acclaimed new novel, The Nickel Boys, available now! Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

The Underground Railroad: A Novel

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad In 2011, Grantland magazine gave bestselling novelist Colson Whitehead $10,000 to play at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was the assignment of a lifetime, except for one hitch—he’d never played in a casino tournament before. With just six weeks to train, our humble narrator took the Greyhound to Atlantic City to learn the ways of high-stakes Texas Hold’em. Poker culture, he discovered, is marked by joy, heartbreak, and grizzled veterans playing against teenage hotshots weaned on Internet gambling. Not to mention the not-to-be overlooked issue of coordinating Port Authority bus schedules with your kid’s drop-off and pickup at school. Finally arriving in Vegas for the multimillion-dollar tournament, Whitehead brilliantly details his progress, both literal and existential, through the event’s antes and turns, through its gritty moments of calculation, hope, and spectacle. Entertaining, ironic, and strangely profound, this epic search for meaning at the World Series of Poker is a sure bet. An NPR Best Book of the Year

The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.\nWhen Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.\nBased on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly).\nLook for Colson Whitehead’s bestselling new novel, Harlem Shuffle!

The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction): A Novel

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES BY BARRY JENKINS (COMING MAY 2021)\nWINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 
WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017 
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016\n'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian\n'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer\n'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist\n'Dazzling' New York Review of Books\nPraised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017.\nCora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.\nIn Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.\nAt each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates 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. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.

The Underground Railroad: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017

Fleet

Crook Manifesto: ‘Whitehead is fast becoming the Dickens of black American life’ SUNDAY TIMES

DOUBLEDAY

Crook Manifesto: ‘Fast, fun, ribald’ Sunday Times

Genre Fiction

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WHITEHEAD,COLSON. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by WHITEHEAD,COLSON

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WHITEHEAD,COLSON. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Colossus of New York : A City in Thirteen Parts

Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor

Zone One

The Underground Railroad: A Novel

The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death

The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction): A Novel

The Underground Railroad: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017

Crook Manifesto: ‘Whitehead is fast becoming the Dickens of black American life’ SUNDAY TIMES

Crook Manifesto: ‘Fast, fun, ribald’ Sunday Times