Colson Whitehead's new heist caper

Also this week, 'Little Women' remixed, critics' picks and more [View this email online]( [NPR]( by Petra Mayer [Colson Whitehead]( Chris Close/Penguin Random House Hello, everyone! I'm back from vacation (huge thanks to Arts Desk pals Meghan Sullivan and Kelli Wessinger for keeping things running while I was wandering around the mountains of West Virginia) and what could be better than returning just in time for a new Colson Whitehead novel? Harlem Shuffle is a sharp, funny, layered heist story set in 1960s Harlem, featuring a furniture store owner named Ray Carney who has a side business fencing stolen goods. [Whitehead tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross]( that he was inspired by a love of heist movies -- and by his curiosity about how stuff actually gets fenced. "There's not a lot of literature about fences," Whitehead says. "But there is actually a book ... [that's] a sociological a study about these guys in the Midwest in the '60s, and one of the first things that struck me was their description of [the fences] being a wall between the straight world and the crooked world." Harlem Shuffle is a pretty big tonal switch from Whitehead's last two books, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys -- brutal, uncompromising stories about slavery and institutional racism. Whitehead says he had to spend six weeks barbecuing and playing video games to get back to himself. But the new novel was different: "Having fun with this crime genre and some of the supporting cast who are kind of colorful was a relief." Is Harlem Shuffle as fun to read as it was to write? Heck yeah, says our critic Denny Bryce, who calls it "[a fabulous novel that you must read]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- Our pals at Code Switch have been talking about books and freedom this summer (seriously, [check out]( [those]( [convos]( if you haven't already) and they're having so much fun they decided to keep going -- so this week the great Leah Donnella talks to French Moroccan author Leila Slimani about her new book In the Country of Others. It's the story of a mixed French and Moroccan family living in Morocco during that country's fight for independence from France in the 1940s and 1950s. "I thought it would be interesting to draw a parallel between a country's fight for independence and the destiny of women," [Slimani says.]( [In the Country of Others, by Leil]( [So Many Beginnings, by Bethany C. Morrow]( All right, so we're a li'l All Code Switch All The Time today but really, you need to check out [this conversation]( between my favorite bookworm Karen Grigsby Bates and Bethany C. Morrow, author of a new take on Little Women called So Many Beginnings. Morrow says she only agreed to write the book on one condition -- that it be a remix, not a reimagining. "I know that as soon as I make the March sisters Black girls, I am not reimagining Little Women," she says. "I'm telling a completely different story." Finally this week -- critic Lily Meyer calls French novelist Laurent Binet's new [Civilizations]( "a work of absolutely unfettered historical invention," in which an Incan emperor conquers 16th-century Spain. "Civilizations is at once a profoundly thoughtful book and a very playful one," Meyer says. [Graceland, At Last]( collects the writing of New York Times columnist and long-time Nashville resident Margaret Renkl. Critic Barbara K. King says the selections represent "Renkl at her most tender and most fierce." Cassandra Khaw's [The All-Consuming World]( is a heist story, yes -- but as critic Jessica P. Wick says, "you might know this story, but you don't yet know it in the hands of Cassandra Khaw. They transform one last heist into ... a visionary, foul-mouthed, gory sci-fi adventure, dripping viscera, violence, and beauty in equal measure." [Civilizations, by Laurent Binet]( [Graceland, At Last, by Margaret Renkl]( [The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw]( And one last thing -- the National Book Award longlists are being announced this week; they kicked off yesterday with kid lit and will finish tomorrow morning with fiction. As each list is announced, [we'll be posting it here]( with links to our coverage, so check in with us for the latest. I hope books bring you what you need this week! — Petra --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. 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