Boswell Book Company is pleased to present a ticketed virtual event featuring the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead to celebrate the paperback release of his latest bestselling novel, Harlem Shuffle. This event is cohosted by several other premier bookstores across America. In conversation with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.
Tickets for this this virtual broadcast costs $14.35 plus tax and ticket fee and include admission to the virtual event and a paperback copy of
Harlem Shuffle that you can pick up at Boswell after the event. Or we’ll ship your copy to you via USPS media mail within the contiguous United States only for an extra charge. A link to the Zoom webinar will be sent out before the event starts.
Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s. Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked. To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife, Elizabeth, are expecting their second child. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. When his cousin is involved in a heist gone wrong, the internal struggle begins between Ray the striver and Ray the crook.
Here’s Boswellian Tim McCarthy’s take on the novel: "Whitehead starkly defines his characters' world as he unwraps their stories with a direct, graceful style and unique symbolism. I met him once at a Boswell Book Company event. I saw the genius in his eyes; the sincerity, too. And he’s funny! Once again, he drops us into another time. Harlem, 1959, was a much harder place than the one where I was born (that same year). I like Ray, and in Whitehead’s masterful hands he becomes real. I haven’t read a better American novelist, living or dead. He stands with James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow. Back-to-back Pulitzers ain’t bad. By giving us the past, Whitehead leads us toward the future. He's the new King of American historical fiction, the new voice as powerful as Doctorow’s. The torch of greatness has been passed."
Colson Whitehead is the New York Times bestselling author of ten works of fiction and nonfiction, a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award.
in conversation with Chris Lee, in-person at Boswell Book Company
Wednesday, August 10, 6:30 pm -
click here to register!
Boswell hosts an evening with Tess Gunty who visits with her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, a stunning story of four teenagers who’ve recently aged out of the state foster-care system and live together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest. Great for fans of Rachel Kushner, Emma Cline, and Ottessa Moshfegh. In conversation with Chris Lee of Boswell, who sat down with Gunty recently for a pre-event mini-chat. Click here and check that out, because once you do, you'll barely be able to wait for this event!
The auto industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down building commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Teenaged Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence,
The Rabbit Hutch is a cerebral, Gothic page-turner that chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth.
Raven Leilani, author of Luster, says: "Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies - the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations." And Boswellian Chris Lee says The Rabbit Hutch is a strong contender for his top book of the year. His review: "Wow. Wonderful, insane, brilliant, and I love, love, love it. Rust belt, Indiana, where the denizens of a crumbling apartment building are desperate to transcend their crumbling lives; to transcend trauma, forgottenness, and fame, to transcend the emptiness of material circumstances. To transcend the body. This book is ALIVE. The lives within it pop, scream, and bleed of the page."
Tess Gunty earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Thursday, August 11, 7 pm
Boswell is pleased to host a virtual event featuring UW graduate Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different, an electrifying debut novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself in Milwaukee among a landscape of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity. Cohosted by A Room of One’s Own in Madison. In conversation with Dawnie Walton, the author of The Final Revival of Opal and Nev.
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She also has a crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But painful secrets rear their heads, jobs go off the rails, and evictions loom.
A beautiful, capacious novel All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and
riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world. From Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise: "Some books are merely luminous - this one is iridescent: with joy and pain,
isolation and communion, solemnity and irreverent humor. Even the title has twin meanings. 'All this could be different' is a sorrowing observation of our contemporary precarity, but 'All this could be different' is equally - and ultimately - a declaration, an electrifying act of resistance."
Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Friday, August 12, 6:30 pm
Boswell hosts an evening with Blake Crouch, author of hit sci-fi thrillers such as Dark Matter and Recursion, for a conversation about his mind-blowing new novel, Upgrade, in which an ordinary man undergoes a startling transformation and soon fears all of humanity may be next. In conversation with Jon Jordan, cofounder of Crimespree Magazine.
Logan Ramsay can feel his brain changing. His body too. He’s becoming something that might be beyond human. As he sets out to discover who did this to him, and why, his transformation threatens everything - his family, job, even his freedom. His DNA has been rewritten with a genetic-engineering breakthrough beyond anything the world has seen, one that could change our very definitions of humanity. And the battle to control this unfathomable power has already begun.
The Boswellians love Crouch’s
Upgrade! From Jason Kennedy: "The science is fascinating as always with his books, and the dire warnings are completely well researched and accurate. Another blast of a book from Blake Crouch." From Kay Wosewick: "Crouch has outdone himself. The scope and depth of Crouch’s research is the engine that makes
Upgrade feel vividly real." And from Jenny Chou: "Not only is
Upgrade a fast-paced thriller, but author Blake Crouch takes a deep dive into the science of DNA. So much of this book is food for thought!"
Blake Crouch is author of books such as Recursion, Dark Matter, and the Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch is a screenwriter and co-created the TNT show Good Behavior.
Boswell is pleased to host Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood, for an evening featuring her second novel, The Women Could Fly, a rich blend of fantasy and sharp social commentary that explores the limits patriarchy puts on women and the powers women use to transcend.
Josephine Thomas is contacted by her mother, who disappeared when she was a child and became a famous true crime story that Jo and her father had to live through. And like the rest of America, they don't know if she was kidnapped, murdered, or worse - a witch. Meanwhile, Jo’s future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by the age of 30 or enroll in a registry that allows them to be monitored. With her ability to control her life on the line, she feels as if she has her never understood her mother more.
Reminiscent of the works of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler, a biting social commentary from the acclaimed author of
Lakewood that speaks to our times - a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother, set in a world in which witches are real and single women are closely monitored.
Megan Giddings is author of Lakewood, one of New York Magazine's top ten books of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards. She is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and her writing has received funding and support from the Barbara Deming Foundation and Hedgebrook.
A note from Daniel - this is another great week of events (every book has a staff rec, some have multiples!), but there are several books here that are near and dear to our heart. You'll be hearing more from me about Megan Giddings! Thanks to Rachel for transcribing and formatting the blog post.
Photo credits:
Colson Whitehead by Chris Close
Sarah Thankam Matthews by Dondre Stuetley
Blake Crouch by Matthew Staver
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