1 The son of a notorious Harlem criminal, Ray is a proud self-made man. The fence is a rarely explored figure of the heist film genre, as he notes (Gross 2022:40.07-40.48). Whitehead centers the novellas on the fence, i.e. In typical Whitehead fashion, he offers a refreshing take on the genre. One novella is a classic heist in the form of a hotel robbery, the second follows a revenge plot and the last is set in the aftermath of a third, botched job. The book consists of three novellas, each centering on a different job, or “caper,” as Whitehead prefers to call them (Gross 2022:42:04-42:12). Harlem Shuffle, published in September 2021, is set in the eponymous neighborhood in the 1960s and follows furniture salesman Ray Carney as he comes to embrace his criminal side. After playing with the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction ( The Intuitionist, 1999), coming-of-age narratives ( Sag Harbor, 2009) and zombie fiction ( Zone One, 2011), his most recent publication takes inspiration from mid-century heist films and crime fiction (Feldman 2021 Jenkins 2021). Now, he returns to his literary project of genre exploration. In his last two novels, Whitehead explored the horrors of slavery in Underground Railroad and the traumatic violence of segregation in Nickel Boys. Where do you go as a writer after being awarded back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes? Somewhere where you “get to be funny again,” as Colson Whitehead states (Feldman 2021).
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