Colson Whitehead in conversation with Steph Cha

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

Colson Whitehead brings his latest novel to our stage: Crook Manifesto, a kaleidoscopic portrait of 1970s Harlem. In his trademark scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, he writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride.

It’s the continuing story he began in Harlem Shuffle, which the Associated Press called a “wildly entertaining romp that delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-twentieth century New York.”

Colson Whitehead is the bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, for which he won Pulitzer prizes. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City. He was recently awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Here’s the video from a virtual event we did with him in conversation with Mary Karr in 2020.

Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.