Book Review
The Harlem Shuffle (2021)
by Colson Whitehead
What more can Colson Whitehead, a winner of consecutive Pulitzer Prizes for his last two novels, accomplish? I guess that would be a Booker Prize, which seems possible or a Nobel, which seems less likely but still not impossible where Ishiguro is a recent winner.
The Pulitzer and National Book Award must have breathed a sigh of relief when they heard that Whitehead's new book was going to be a work of historical crime fiction. Exciting, as would be an announcement for any new Whitehead title, but not, you know, a book that is likely to merit a third Pulitzer, simply by virtue of genre. I haven't checked, but crime fiction doesn't win any prizes outside of those exclusive to the genre.
Like Zone One, Whitehead's zombie book,
The Harlem Shuffle is both a work of genre, observing relevant genre specific rules, and a work of literary fiction, using authorial skills of character depiction and plot mechanics to create something separate from a strictly genre work.
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