Colson Whitehead Archive
Memory, Mediocrity, and Gentrification in Zone One
Combining elegant craft and clairvoyant perspective with tropes of the zombie novel, Colson Whitehead unsettles our conception of what it means to be human, to connect with each other, and how we understand what defines us as individuals.
Revisiting The Intuitionist
Colson Whitehead’s first book is a complex story that takes an authoritative point of view within a deeply imagined world.
The Tent Moment
Certain writers—often those writers who are said to “transcend their genre”—combine action-filled plots with complex character development. How do they stop the action in, say, a zombie apocalypse, so that the characters can become intimate and so the reader can grow to care about their inner lives?
“Is this the truth of our historic encounter?”: Museums in Literature
Not all representations of museums overtly highlight the way they structurally rely on certain power dynamics, and yet the adherence to a certain normalizing discourse is always there, lurking, even when the explicit intention of the museum is to reconnect with a lost past.
Past the City Limit Sign: The Role of Rural in 2016 Books
What kinds of stories will emerge that focus on rural or city settings during a Trump presidency? Will the typical themes continue to be cemented or will variations become the norm?
Round-Up: The National Book Awards, Bob Dylan to Miss Nobel Ceremony, and Zadie Smith’s SWING TIME
From the National Book Award winners to Zadie Smith’s newest novel, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines: The 67th annual National Book Awards ceremony took place November 16. The winners included Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad for fiction, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of
Fracking, Glove Making, and Elevator Inspection: Industry in Novels
I delighted in Alexandra Petri’s column, “An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.” A writer must be able to laugh, kindly, at herself, and perhaps less kindly at others, especially when those others are extremely successful.
Colson Whitehead on Slavery, Elevators, and Donald Trump
I got to know Colson Whitehead back when he was infiltrating the poker world for his non-fiction narrative, The Noble Hustle. His new novel, The Underground Railroad, has been honored by none other than Oprah Winfrey with her latest book club selection.
“What is the name of this monster? Poetry….”
In his excellent zombie novel, Zone One, Colson Whitehead writes: “We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” This sentence encapsulates one of the novel’s themes, but it can also be applied to a current trend in poetry which brings monsters to the