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Colson Whitehead
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About this episode
The New York writer and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Colson Whitehead, speaks to Take Four Books about his latest novel, Cool Machine, and, together with presenter James Crawford, they explore its connections to three other books. In three interlinking stories, Cool Machine - the final instalment in Colson's Harlem Trilogy - showcases the grit and grandeur of 1980s New York through its underground wheeler-dealer protagonist, Ray Carney, who runs a furniture business on 125th Street with a lucrative side hustle. For his three influences Colson chose: Junky by William Burroughs (1953); One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967); and The Hunter by…