The prodigies are often annoying: too gifted, too calibrated, too in tune with the times.
Colson Whitehead is not one of them, despite his two (!) Pulitzer Prizes.
The American writer, born in 1969, has worked in several genres, he even wrote a novel with zombies.
In 2017, he was dedicated for the first time for
Underground Railroad,
the story of a slave in the 19th century.
In 2020, it was another crowning achievement via
Nickel Boys,
chronicling the tribulations of young black people in a boot camp.
Obviously, we imagined that for the next one, French readers would be entitled to the inevitable banner “Barack Obama's favorite book”.
Harlem Shuffle,
title of a 1963 soul classic (Bob & Earl, then the Actions, and later still, the Rolling Stones), escapes the facilities: Whitehead describes the life of a young African-American, Ray Carney, from the end of the 1950s to 1964. He was a Mr. Everyman selling furniture and radios who occasionally resold objects…
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