Colson Whitehead: 5 books I love
Erin Stropes | CBC | Posted: April 28, 2017 1:03 PM | Last Updated: May 4, 2017
Colson Whitehead's wide-ranging, genre-defying writing has earned him everything from a Guggenheim Fellowship to a place of honour in Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and Barack Obama's summer reading list. His latest novel, The Underground Railroad, imagines a world where U.S. plantation workers escaped slavery via a literal network of tunnels and underground pathways. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Here, the award-winning author chooses five books he absolutely loves.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
"Perhaps my favourite novel? Re-read it after 25 years and was stunned by its incandescent power. Helped immensely with rethinking how to calibrate fantastic effects, which came in handy with The Underground Railroad."
Blue Laws by Kevin Young
"Young's new and selected poems are a testament to his fierce intelligence and wide-roving inquiries. Whether tackling film noir or Amistad rebels, Basquiat or the blues, he never fails to illuminate some new corner of the world."
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
"A new addition to my gallery of favourites, this nimble memoir is an eccentric masterpiece. Birds! More birds! Macdonald's relentless pursuit of personal and universal truth will leave you mesmerized."
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
"A posthumous collection that gathers 40-plus stories from this overlooked writer and gives them a worthy showcase. Autobiographical fiction like an intimate conversation in the wee hours, Pall Mall smoke filling the air."
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
"With her new novel on the way, it's worth revisiting ZZ's masterful debut collection. These are stories with a bite, sneaky and wise. Start with 'The Ant of the Self' and 'Brownies.'"