Talking Volumes: Colson Whitehead Wednesday, November 11 at 7:00 p.m.
Twenty-seven seasons in, Talking Volumes — presented by MPR News and the Minnesota Star Tribune — remains one of the region’s most anticipated literary event series. This fall, five bestselling authors sit down with award-winning journalists Kerri Miller and Catharine Richert for deep conversations about their books, their lives, and the ideas shaping our world. And we’ll do it all in a welcoming new home: The O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University.
Join Talking Volumes for a live conversation with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author Colson Whitehead. Whitehead will join MPR News journalist Catherine Richert to discuss Cool Machine, the electrifying conclusion to his acclaimed Harlem Trilogy. Spanning 1981 to 1986, the novel paints a pitch-perfect portrait of a transforming New York City gripped by Reagan-era capitalism and a booming art scene. Follow beloved furniture dealer and master fence Ray Carney and his fierce partner, Pepper, as they navigate one last high-stakes heist, the violent underbelly of the East Village, and a dangerous rescue mission. Don’t miss this evening of dazzling storytelling and insightful conversation at The O’Shaughnessy Auditorium about a city in transition and the truths beneath its surface.
About the Author
COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twelve works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
About the book
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.
Talking Volumes would like to thank our season sponsor Episcopal Homes.
