Colson Whitehead on His Harlem Trilogy

Summary

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The New Yorker Radio Hour: Colson Whitehead on His Harlem Trilogy

Host: David Remnick
Guest: Colson Whitehead
Date: June 2, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, David Remnick sits down with acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead to discuss his celebrated Harlem Trilogy, including the forthcoming final installment, Cool Machine. The conversation explores Whitehead’s creative process, his genre-shifting tendencies, research methods, personal history, the moral and political dimensions of his fiction, and his literary influences. With signature wit, Whitehead reflects on the intersection of crime, society, and history in his work, as well as the expectations placed on Black writers. The episode features memorable anecdotes, including a reading from Crook Manifesto, and insightful commentary on New York City as both subject and symbol.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origins of Ray Carney and the Harlem Trilogy

• Introducing Ray Carney

  • Carney is depicted as an everyman—“a furniture salesman in Harlem” who secretly fences stolen goods ([01:12]).
  • His life is complicated rather than villainous: “He’s looking to pay his bills and get by. But life tends to get complicated, especially in a novel by Colson Whitehead.” —David Remnick ([01:12]).

• From Journalism to Fiction

  • Whitehead began his career in journalism, writing for Village Voice, but always aspired to fiction ([02:21]).
    • “I always wanted to write fiction…TV criticism is very accepted now, but back then…it was really embarrassing.” —Colson Whitehead ([02:21]).

Genre-Bending and Literary Freedom

• Whitehead’s Use of Genre

  • The author is known for moving between genres—zombies, heists, fantasy—and sees no obligation to conform to expectations ([03:12]).
    • “I’m not thinking about what a Black writer should be doing. I’m not thinking about what a literary writer should be doing…I wanted to write fantasy…that’s part of my makeup.” —Colson Whitehead ([04:05]).
  • Instead of external expectations, his focus is on following his own interests:
    • “I should be doing the work that’s compelling and interesting.” ([04:05])

• Literary Responsibility and Critical Reception

  • Whitehead feels pressure primarily from himself, not external critics or academia ([04:54]).
    • “My internal pressures are so much more intense than anything outside.” ([04:54])

Disappointments and Retrospection

• Mixed Reception of Zone One (Zombie Novel)
  • Whitehead reflects on the muted response from horror fans:
    • “I thought that horror fans would embrace it more, but it is actually pretty slow and cerebral...It’s about trauma…How do we remake ourselves after a disaster?” ([05:37])
  • He revisits his first novel (The Intuitionist) and recognizes his growth, recalling his days “so broke” he’d walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to save subway fare ([06:42]).

Craft and Research

• Methods and Sources

  • Whitehead relies on primary sources for authenticity, such as gangster memoirs and period-specific slang ([09:12]).
    • “Where else do you go but to the source?...I’m assembling a vocabulary and a sense of atmosphere.” ([09:32])

• Obsession with Furniture

  • The protagonist’s furniture business demands granular knowledge:
    • “Finding furniture pamphlets from the 50s and 60s…All that stuff’s on Pinterest…weird furniture fanatics.” ([10:48])
  • On never leaving the house for research: “Too many people outside.” ([11:22])
  • Example of period language: “Champagne finishes on the arms of couches and chairs.” ([11:45])
  • Personal connections emerge belatedly—Whitehead’s parents’ Harlem memories mirrored those in his novel, but he realized after most research was done ([15:20]).

Social and Political Resonances

• Real-World History and Fictional Timeliness

  • Coincidence between his writing and national events, such as protests after George Floyd’s murder ([16:22]).
    • “Turns out if you write about police violence and atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again. So that's America.” ([16:59])
  • Parallels between historical and contemporary injustice:
    • “The way that people…would describe slave catchers were the same way that I would use to be stopped by police.” ([17:01])

• On Political Responsibility

  • Whitehead rejects the idea of obligatory political engagement for writers ([18:21]):
    • “If you want to write about gardening, do that...I don’t feel responsibility, except not to make the book bad.” ([18:21])

Humor, Audience Expectations, and Identity

• Subverting Expectations
  • Whitehead’s self-deprecating wit subverts expectations of the “serious Black writer” ([19:13]):
    • “I’m just like a weird, random guy who’s…glad to be out of the house and makes weird jokes.” ([19:13])
  • Jokes about researching a romance set during the Russian Revolution: “I'm watching Golden Girls reruns just like binging…taking notes, Blanche and the girls.” ([25:19])

Sympathy for Criminals—Morality in Fiction

• Criminality as Survival and Reflection
  • Whitehead is less interested in moral judgment, seeing crime in the trilogy as driven by necessity and context ([20:20]).
    • “When people connect with Carney…that connection is recognizing their own sort of secret life in him.” ([20:20])
  • His characters appear relatively virtuous compared to their corrupt adversaries ([21:16]).

New York as Microcosm and Subject

• City as Character
  • Whitehead reflects on New York as both unique and universal, with Colossus of New York using the city to evoke feelings about any “home” ([22:11]):
    • “New Yorkers think of themselves as somehow outside the world…The snob in me wants to say that New York is special. But it is just another place when you get down to it.” ([22:11])
    • “We’re always walking around superimposing what used to be there over what’s there now and mourning…being a bit unfair to how the city changes.” ([23:03])

Influences and Artistic Philosophy

• Models of Versatility
  • Whitehead champions artistic experimentation, citing Stanley Kubrick and David Bowie ([23:53]):
    • “If you knew how to do something, why do it again?…for me, if I step back, it's one big story…one guy in three different decades and a city in three different decades.” ([24:07])

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Black writers and genre:
  • “The only function of the black writer in America now is…to produce works of literature about whatever he wants to write about.” —Chester Himes, quoted by Remnick ([03:12])
• On self-pressure:
  • “My internal pressures are so much more intense than anything outside.” —Colson Whitehead ([04:54])
• On police violence and fiction:
  • “Turns out if you write about police violence and atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again. So that's America.” —Colson Whitehead ([16:59])
• On artistic freedom:
  • “If you want to write about gardening, do that...I don’t feel responsibility, except not to make the book bad.” —Colson Whitehead ([18:21])
• On subverting expectations:
  • “I come out and I'm just like a weird, random guy who's really, really lucky…makes weird jokes and talks about these different things.” ([19:13])
• On crime and morality:
  • “I think Ray Carney has this secret self, this criminal self. But I think all of us have these different uncivilized impulses in us that we have to tame…” ([20:20])

Timeline of Important Segments

• Ray Carney and Harlem Trilogy Intro: [01:12]
• Whitehead’s Path: Journalism to Fiction: [02:21]
• Genre and Literary Freedom: [03:12–04:54]
• On Zone One & Authorial Disappointment: [05:33]
• Reading from Crook Manifesto: [07:36]
• On Research, Atmosphere, and Slang: [09:12–11:45]
• Parents’ Harlem Memories: [15:20]
• Historical Resonances of Protest: [16:02–16:59]
• Political Responsibility (or Lack Thereof): [18:14]
• Reading The Jerk, Subverting Expectations: [18:46–19:13]
• Moral Complexity of Crime: [20:20]
• New York as Universal/Home: [22:11–23:03]
• Versatility & Artistic Influence: [23:12–24:47]
• Genres Whitehead Hasn’t Yet Tried: [24:47–25:19]

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Conclusion

This rich conversation offers a revealing look at Colson Whitehead’s creative mind and the themes that shape his Harlem Trilogy. Listeners gain insight into his views on genre, race, artistic responsibility, and the enduring pull of New York City, all delivered with humility and humor. The episode provides both aspiring writers and literary fans a compelling exploration of craft, identity, and artistic evolution.

Transcript

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[David Remnick]

Please join us for a live taping of the New Yorker Radio hour at the 25th anniversary of the Tribeca Festival. I'll be there with the former Obama speechwriter and co host of Pod Save America, John Lovett. We'll talk about the state of the nation and the state of podcasting and much more. The show is Wednesday, June 10, and tickets are available at tribecafilm.com audio tribecafilm.com Audio See.

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[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Colson Whitehead's character, Ray Carney, is one of the great crooks in recent fiction. Ray isn't big time. He's not even a kingpin, and he's not even a particularly bad guy. He's a furniture salesman in Harlem. He sells Barca loungers in the store and out the back door. He fences stolen goods. He's looking to pay his bills and get by. But life tends to get complicated, especially in a novel by Colson Whitehead. Ray first appeared in Harlem Shuffle and returned in the sequel. Crook Manifesto, the third book of Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy comes out this summer, and it's called Cool Machine. Whitehead is one of only four novelists ever to win the Pulitzer Prize twice. We spoke in 2023, when Crook Manifesto had just come out. How did you envision it in the beginning? You started with some journalism and awfully good journalism too. Was it difficult to make that leap into imaginative literature, into writing fiction?

[Colson Whitehead]

I always wanted to write fiction, so I loved the Village Voice growing up, and it was my dream job to start off there. I worked in the book section. It was my job to open the 40 books a day we got from bookseller from publishers. At that point, if you were in the building, you could get work. And so I hit up the TV editor for my first piece, my big break. And now TV criticism is very accepted and it's A real part of the arts. But back then it was like the saddest, like, why are you writing about tv? It was really embarrassing. So I figured I would fit in. And my break into journalism was a think piece about the series finales of the show's Growing Pains and who's the boss? And 30 years later, I think it holds up. Does it? The definitive think piece about those two.

[David Remnick]

You've used genre all throughout your writing career, all kinds of them. Zombies and heists and fantasy, in a way. And you've been questioned sometimes in reviews about why you skip around from one thing to the next, and it's left to Chester Himes, maybe, to explain this. I just found this quotation began a piece about Chester Himes in the New Yorker by Hilton Owls. And chester Himes in 1970 writes, I think the only function of the black writer in America now is. Is just to produce works of literature about whatever he wants to write about. At least the world will be more informed about the black American subconscious. Now, that's not to say that you're only writing about race, God knows, but it's kind of a liberating notion that whatever your subject is, whatever the hell you want it to be, and not to just dig one trench your entire career.

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, yeah, I'm not thinking about what a black writer should be doing. I'm not thinking about what a literary writer should be doing. I was inspired by, you know, to become a writer when I was very young, by comic books and Stephen King, and I wanted to write fantasy. So that's part of my makeup. And if I keep doing this, I get to write in all these different modes that I enjoy. And in the end, we're sort of not here for a long time on Earth. And I should probably not worry about some abstract critic and what they think I should be doing. I should be doing the work that's compelling and interesting. And if I like all these different modes, why not write my heist novel? Why not write my zombie novel?

[David Remnick]

Do you feel some kind of pressure from outside, from wherever, from academia, from critics, from other writers to do this or that, to be more X or y?

[Colson Whitehead]

I feel pressure from myself not to screw up the idea. You know, I think in terms of those external pressures you're describing, they're really secondary and small. To my own inner voice that's saying, don't slack, keep working hard, don't coast. Is this sentence the best it can be? Is this paragraph the best it can be? When will this book be finished? When I've Made sure that it's the best book I can write at 52, at 27, at 35. And so my internal pressures are so much more intense than anything outside.

[David Remnick]

What's been your biggest disappointment along the way?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, I think Zone one, my zombie novel, has people who like it a lot. I thought that horror fans would embrace it more, but it is actually pretty slow and cerebral and not necessarily does it have all the pleasures one associates with the horror novel. There's definitely some gore in exploding people and stuff and people getting bitten by zombies, but it's about trauma. You know, we're recording this across the street from the former side of the World Trade center, and that definitely is in the book. How do you come back from a catastrophe, a personal catastrophe, a societal catastrophe? How do we remake ourselves after a disaster? And so I thought maybe some of the hardcore gorehounds might appreciate some of those musings.

[David Remnick]

And they didn't.

[Colson Whitehead]

Not so much. Not so much. I didn't go back to the intuitionist for many, many years.

[David Remnick]

And last year, your first novel.

[Colson Whitehead]

My first novel. And I went back and read it and I was like, ah, I shouldn't, you know, be so hard on myself. You know, the book's not that bad,

[David Remnick]

but you recognized it as you. You could hear yourself.

[Colson Whitehead]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Remnick]

Your habits of mind, your language.

[Colson Whitehead]

But the preoccupations and the conditions of its creation were so remote. You know, I was such a loner and so broke and, you know, I would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to save money on the subway and I would shake my fist at the skyline like, you can't break me. I'm writing this book and, you know, things are so different now. I have a family and, you know, I'm not such a loner. But the closest, you know, the most recent book is the one that's closest to me and I recognize where it comes from. And in this case, I'm excited to finish this, you know, continue that story.

[David Remnick]

Colson, I'd like you to read, if you don't mind, just the opening of Crook Manifesto. You're describing Carney and his furniture business, which is not quite profitable enough, it turns out, to keep him out of crime altogether. Would you read that for us?

[Colson Whitehead]

From then on, whenever he heard the song, he thought of the death of Munson. It was the Jackson 5, after all, who put Ray Carney back in the game following four years on the straight and narrow. The straight and narrow. It described a philosophy in a territory, a neighborhood with borders and local customs. Sometimes he crossed 7th Avenue on the way to work and mumbled the words to himself like a rummy trying not to weave across the sidewalk on the way home from the bars. Four years of honest and rewarding work in home furnishings. Carney outfitted newlyweds for their expedition and upgraded living rooms to suit improved circumstances. Coached retirees through the array of modern recliner options. It was a grave responsibility. Just last week, one of his customers told him that her father had passed away in his sleep with a smile on his face while cradled in a sterling Dreamer purchased at Carney's Furniture. The man had been a plumber with the city for 35 years, she said. His final earthly feeling had been the luxurious caress of that polyurethane core. Carney was glad the man went out satisfied. How tragic for your last thought to be, I should have gone with the Naugahide.

[David Remnick]

Talk to me about research. I have to think that in order to do these novels and really other novels of yours. But let's concentrate on these Harlem novels. What's the depth of research? How does it work?

[Colson Whitehead]

For me, it's always primary sources. And so memoirs of gangsters. Bumpy Johnson, who was a Harlem gangster in the 50s, his wife wrote a memoir, trying to set the record straight. I'm not sure what was wrong in the public record, but what do you

[David Remnick]

get from Bumpy Johnson's widow's memoir? What are the kind of specific details you might get?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, she broke down how a numbers operation works. A numbers operation is an unofficial lottery and different neighborhoods. And she broke out how the numbers runner works and the bank and how they transfer the money. And where else do you go but to the source? And so a lot of it is slang. You know, I love getting authentic nouns and verbs, whether it was from slave narratives for Underground Railroad or for this William Burroughs first book, Junkie, is about, you know, being a hustler in Harlem, Upper west side, in downtown in the 50s. And there's this great underworld slang. And for me, someone who loves different kinds of slang, whether contemporary or old, it's this real gold mine. So I'm assembling a vocabulary and a sense of atmosphere.

[David Remnick]

You also have a tremendous knowledge of furniture. And not since, I think maybe since reading about the glove factory in American Pastoral by Philip Roth, have I seen such attention to a kind of seemingly banal as furniture. And our main character, of course, runs a furniture store. And we learn all about not just Barca loungers. That's nothing. I mean, real detail about furniture.

[Colson Whitehead]

I like to get into character. I started doing research into Fences. The main character, Ray Carney, is a fence. He takes stolen goods and recirculates them into polite society. A lot of them will have a front business and in the back is where they do their illegal shenanigans. So I picked furniture and then I had to sell it. And that means, you know, finding furniture pamphlets from the 50s and 60s. All that stuff's on Pinterest. You know, weird furniture fanatics.

[David Remnick]

I'm working on Pinterest. I pictured you at the Schoenberg Library or something deep in the archives. You can get all this online.

[Colson Whitehead]

I never leave the house. I never leave the house. Too many people outside. Yes. Whatever your interest is, someone has put it on Pinterest. And so I can put in 50s furniture catalog and find somebody scanned in like a Sears catalog. And it's just great language that I steal the same way I steal language from a memoir.

[David Remnick]

Give me an example of language that you pluck off of Pinterest.

[Colson Whitehead]

Champagne finishes on the arms of couches and chairs. I think, you know, looking back, my first furniture from watching the Brady Bunch or the Twilight Zone, 60s, 70s sitcoms is this very sleek mid century furniture. So in some ways that those are. I'm describing my platonic ideals of what furniture is. So, you know, a book is a journey and I was doing some personal journeying into how I feel about furniture.

[David Remnick]

I'm speaking with Colson Whitehead. More in a moment.

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[David Remnick]

This is Eric Glass on this American Life. One thing we like is a good mystery sometimes about really big things, things you hear in the news. But most times the little mysteries are the best.

[Colson Whitehead]

Our lost and found is currently filled with pants.

[David Remnick]

I don't know, I've never seen this happen.

[Colson Whitehead]

I've got skirts, I've got shorts.

[David Remnick]

This is true. This is true. Mysteries of every size each week. This American life. Wherever you get your podcasts. Now. Your parents spent some years in Harlem before they moved elsewhere in Manhattan. Were they a help in terms of research, in terms of, you know, make sure you're not screwing up in terms of status detail?

[Colson Whitehead]

My mom would have been great if I'd actually gone to her for help. It didn't occur to me that I was describing in the first book, Harlem in the 60s, and Carney is starting a family. And that's when my parents were starting a family in Harlem. So I do all this research and all this grunt work and then I would tell my mother, oh, did you know there was this old chock full of nuts and this place to Hotel Theresa? And she's like, yeah, I worked around the corner. I was there every day. Blumstein's was a famous department store in Harlem. Found that out, put it in a book, told my mom. She's like, oh, yeah, your dad worked there for two summers during college. Like, what? So as usual, I have to do it the hard way. I have to do it the hard way when the easy way is right there.

[David Remnick]

It Seems almost uncanny, but not only about these books, but others, that they are written at moments in time that are extremely evocative. For example, you just finished writing when the protests came out after the killing of George Floyd. Did that have any effect on the work?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, no. I mean the End of Harlem Shuffle ends with an anti police riot in New York, in Harlem, which actually happened in 64. In 64. And I conceived of that time period years before George Floyd was murdered. I finished the book the day before the first day of the riots and the protests. So it was really strange. And at that point it was in the can and I changed maybe one line that occurred to me, but I was not inspired by that. Turns out if you write about police violence and atrocities, if you wait a month, it'll happen again. So that's America.

[David Remnick]

How do you mean it's America?

[Colson Whitehead]

I mean that when I was riding underground railroad and describing slave catchers, the way that people who are writing slave narratives would describe slave catchers were the same way that I would use to be stopped by police. There's the same kind of language of humiliation outrage over the sort of abstract horror of being stopped in that way. And I grew up in New York in the 80s where you'd hear about Michael Griffith, Eleanor Bumpers. Every year there was some high profile police brutality case and there's a big conversation and then it fades away. And then something else happens and we talk about it and then it fades away.

[David Remnick]

Is that where we are now, vis a vis George Floyd in the summer of 2020?

[Colson Whitehead]

We're in between atrocities and I think we usually are. Perhaps something's being recorded on somebody's pocket cell phone right now and we'll hear about it next week. But we don't actually put the effort in to change policing. A lot of the country is pretty racist and we're going to have these eruptions, big or small, until we change that. But nobody seems really that interested, particularly

[David Remnick]

now or just eternally, I think.

[Colson Whitehead]

Eternally, yeah.

[David Remnick]

Colson, what sense of political responsibility do you feel as a writer of fiction?

[Colson Whitehead]

None. Well, in terms of fiction, writers in general, do what you want to do. If you want to write about gardening, do that. If you want to write love poetry, do that. For me personally, I like writing about politics and institutional structures and also the city and also pop culture. And all these different things are in different books or non different books. I don't feel responsibility, except not to make the book bad.

[David Remnick]

You feel pushed on the sense of responsibility. You did a very sly and funny thing I think in a lecture, you started reciting the first lines of the timeless movie the Jerk by Steve Martin, in which he describes himself as. It was never easy for me. I was.

[Colson Whitehead]

I was a poor black child singing and dancing on my porch in Mississippi.

[David Remnick]

I remember the days.

[Colson Whitehead]

And I think sometimes when I walk in front of an audience, there are different expectations of what a black person is a black writer is. If it's a mostly white space, which is what? Oh, well, I think definitely, if you came to my work from Underground Railroad, here's this guy who talks about institutional racism and American history only. Yes. And then I come out and I'm just like a weird, random guy who's really, really lucky that people likes his books and is glad to be out of the house and makes weird jokes and talks about these different things.

[David Remnick]

One of the things that I sense in these novels is a certain sympathy with the criminal and the criminal activity. In other words, it's not presented as just pure horror show and cruelty and all the rest. It's presented as something that's done out of a certain sense of necessity, desperation, and that it's very difficult to do. This is kind of clinical view of the criminal act. How did you come to that? I think I'm getting this right. Maybe I'm not.

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, I think there are different kinds of criminal activity. There's robbery, there's being a fence, and then there's political corruption, all kinds of graft. And I'm exploring different ways of being a criminal and trying to think about who actually is bad. I think Ray Carney has this secret self, this criminal self. But I think all of us have these different uncivilized impulses in us that we have to tame in order to function in society. And so I think when people connect with Carney, they're part of that connection is recognizing their own sort of secret life in him. So I think back to your question. I'm not judging. I'm definitely not judging them. It never occurred to me that Carney would be like a bad person. He's a guy just trying to get over, get over, have a nice apartment with enough bedrooms for his kids and be a good husband and sell some furniture. You know, when we think about the main character, Carnie or Pepper, the secondary main character, it's kind of okay because everyone else is worse. Like all their adversaries and all the people they're forced to deal with are so much worse and doing so much. Engage in so much deeper corruption and thorough corruption that a murder here and There is. Not bad compared to the kind of moral bankruptcy.

[David Remnick]

New York City is a huge part of your books, many of them, including the Colossus of New York, which is a portrait of the sea. I love that book. And you say at one point there that talking about New York is a way of talking about the world. New Yorkers think of themselves as somehow outside the world. A 51st state, maybe a separate country. Exceptional. Is New York the same as talking about the world?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, there's public Persona me, and then there's a private Coulson. I think that, you know, I think New York is special. And it's one of my sort of big subjects. I come to it, I keep coming back to it, and I think, you know, and I think the snob in me wants to say that New York is special. But it is just another place when you get down to it. And if you walk in the subway in Paris or in London, it could be New York subway. And if you get lost in the tall buildings in Sao Paulo, downtown Los Angeles, it could be New York. And I think what I was trying to do in Colossus of New York, where that quote is from, is evoke how we feel about our home, no matter how big or how small it is. You know, we're always walking around superimposing what used to be there over what's

[David Remnick]

there now and bemoaning what's being lost

[Colson Whitehead]

and mourning and mourning that and being a bit unfair to how the city changes.

[David Remnick]

You have been compared to the most disparate riders I can imagine of anybody I can think of. It ranges from Stephen King to Thomas Pynchon. And I think you take both as a compliment.

[Colson Whitehead]

Yeah, I do. Well, I think maybe not a writer, but you're a reader. But you can enjoy Mad magazine and you can enjoy Dostoevsky and you can enjoy.

[David Remnick]

But usually Dostoevsky is not writing Mad magazine and Alberg is not writing Crime and Punishment.

[Colson Whitehead]

I guess not. But it seems sort of natural to me that if he likes something, why not do it?

[David Remnick]

Who's got the versatility like that that you admire? Who's a model for that?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, I think an early model for me would have been Stanley Kubrick, you know, his war movie, his black comedy, his horror movie, his sci fi movie. What can I get out of this genre? You know, I'm throwing everything out that I did last time and starting new. And then David Bowie, you know, in his 70s and early 80s run, he only always had a different Persona. Ziggy Stardust, Thin White Duke. And it seemed like if you knew how to do something, why do it again? Of course, I'm doing a trilogy now, so I'm doing the same thing. But for me, if I step back, it's one big story, one 1100 page story about one guy in three different decades and a city in three different decades. So I think I internalized that kind of idea of being an artist early. If you can do something, why do it again? And if you like something, why not try it?

[David Remnick]

Is there a genre that has gone untouched so far by you that you're dying to try?

[Colson Whitehead]

Well, I think the obvious is a romance. And I'll joke that I am trying it now. And it's a love story set on the eve of the Russian Revolution. So for research, because there's so many white people, I'm watching Golden Girls reruns just like binging

[David Remnick]

Golden Girls reruns in order to research the Russian Revolution.

[Colson Whitehead]

Yeah, white people. How do white people act? You know, taking notes, blanching the girls.

[David Remnick]

How do white people act? Colson Whitehead, thank you so much.

[Colson Whitehead]

Sure. It's been a pleasure.

[David Remnick]

Why didn't I think of that? Yeah.

[Colson Whitehead]

Russian scholar

[David Remnick]

Bea Arthur is Anastasia.

[Colson Whitehead]

Yes,

[David Remnick]

I spoke with Colson Whitehead in 2023. His final installment in the Harlem trilogy is called Cool Machine and it comes out in July. You can find a story about the protagonist Ray Carney, and you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening today. Hope you enjoyed the program and we'll see you next time.

[WNYC Announcer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Mike Kutchman, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. ProPublica has broken some of the biggest investigative stories in recent history, from conflicts of interest at the Supreme Court to the deadly impact of abortion bans. Now we're bringing our journalism straight to your ears on a new podcast, Paper Trip Trail. Each episode we take you inside a new investigation. We'll tell you how some of the best investigative reporters in the country know what they know and how the world changed in response to their reporting. I'm Jessica Lussenhop. Follow paper trail on your favorite podcast, apparently.