The New York Times top book reviewer Michiko Kakutani called “The Underground Railroad” “potent, almost hallucinatory” and put it in the same company as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” adding there were “brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift.” Cover of Colson Whitehead's new book "The Underground Railroad." (Courtesy Doubleday)Īnd in August, President Obama made it one of his summer vacation reading list choices. “I knew it was going to sell well initially and that people who weren’t necessarily attracted to the premises of my earlier books would pick it up.” (His previous novel, “Zone One,” dealt with zombies in a post-apocalyptic New York.)īut then… Oprah relaunched her Book Club with “The Underground Railroad” and raved that it “kept me up at night, had my heart in my throat, almost afraid to turn the next page.” “Enthusiasm for the book had been building ever since I handed it into the publishing house and then booksellers were getting it,” Whitehead says, on the phone from his Nashville hotel room. Not that acclaim or success was unanticipated by the writer. But he’s experienced no wave quite like the one he’s riding now with “The Underground Railroad,” a lacerating story of slavery set in the Deep South. (Courtesy Madeline Whitehead) This article is more than 6 years old.Ĭolson Whitehead has ridden a few big waves over the years as a bestselling author and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
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