“I had to keep my mouth shut for four months so the publisher could print extra copies.”Ī father of two - a 12-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son - Whitehead lives in Brooklyn with his wife, literary agent Julie Barer, to whom “Railroad” is dedicated. “She reached out to us in April,” Whitehead said by phone this month. Oprah Winfrey ensured that the book would be one of the year’s most buzzed-about titles when she selected it for her book club in August. His genre-skipping books range from the speculative fiction of his 1999 debut, “The Intuitionist,” to the blood-splattered humor of his 2011 zombie thriller “Zone One.” He has written historical fiction (“John Henry Days”), a poker memoir (“The Noble Hustle”) and an autobiographical coming-of-age novel about upper-crust black kids in 1980s Long Island (“Sag Harbor”).Ī MacArthur Foundation “genius,” he has just won a National Book Award for his most ambitious novel yet - “The Underground Railroad.” Colson Whitehead switches literary styles the way a race car driver shifts gears.
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