Winter 2016

Quite a year. The Underground Railroad was:

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

Finalist for the Carnegie Medal

#1 New York Times Bestseller

#1 Time Magazine Book of the Year

#1 Amazon Book of the Year

A New York Times Best Book of the Year

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A GQ Best Book of the Year

A Newsday Best Book of the Year

An O Magazine Book of the Year

A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year

A Star Tribune Best Book of Year

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

An Esquire Best Book of the Year

Not bad!

Summer 2016

And the book is out! Oprah chose it as the latest title in her book club.

All the info is here. No, seriously, go here.

“Kept me up at night, had my heart in my throat, almost afraid to turn the next page. Get it, then get another copy for someone you know because you are definitely going to want to talk about it once you read that heart-stopping last page.”

--Oprah Winfrey, (Oprah’s Book Club 2016 selection)

“[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel... It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.”

--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“[T]hink Toni Morrison (Beloved), Alex Haley (Roots); think 12 Years a Slave…[A]n electrifying novel…a great adventure tale, teeming with memorable characters…Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember.”

--People, (Book of the Week)

“The first thing to say about Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, is that it’s really good — good, in fact, in just about every way a novel can be good…[A] fully realized masterpiece, a weird blend of history and fantasy that will have critics rightfully making comparisons to Toni Morrison and Gabriel García-Márquez… Lovely and rare, dark and imaginative, The Underground Railroad is Whitehead’s best work and an important American novel.”

--The Boston Globe

“Far and away the most anticipated literary novel of the year, The Underground Railroad marks a new triumph for Whitehead…[A] book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era...The canon of essential novels about America's peculiar institution just grew by one.”

--Ron Charles, Washington Post

Dates subject to change, but here is the fall tour:

September 10

Winston-Salem, NC

Bookmarks Festival, 1:45pm

September 13

Chicago, IL

University of Chicago, 6pm

September 14

St. Louis, MO

St. Louis County Library, 7pm

September 15

San Francisco, CA

Green Apple Books, 9th Ave, 7:30pm

September 16

Los Angeles, CA

L.A. Library, 7:30pm

September 17

Seattle, WA

Seatte Public Library, 7:00pm

September 19

Dallas, TX

Highland Park United Methodist, 7pm

September 20

Nashville, TN

Parnassus Books, 6:30pm

September 21

Atlanta, GA

The Carter Center, 7pm

September 22

Durham, NC

Durham Armory, 7pm

September 24

Washington DC

National Book Festival, 11:40am

September 26

Brooklyn, NY

BAM, 7pm

September 27

Philadelphia, PA

Free Library, 7:30pm

September 28

Baltimore, MD

Central Library, 7pm

September 29

Washington DC

Politics and Prose, 8pm

October 1

Morristown, NJ

Morristown Book Festival

October 15

Boston, MA

Boston Book Festival

October 16

Concord, NH

Capital Center for the Arts, 7pm

October 20-21Vancouver, Canada

Vancouver Book Festival

October 24

Pittsburgh, PA

Carnegie Music Hall, 7:30pm

October 26

Manhattan, NY

Barnes & Noble, 82nd & Broadway, 7:00pm

November 2

Iowa City, IA

Prairie Lights

November 3

Minneapolis, MN

November 4-5

Portland, OR

Wordstock Festival

November 7

Toronto, Canada

November 13-17

United Kingdom

November 18-19

Miami Book Fair

December 4

Lower Merien, PA

December 5

Louisville, KY

Colson Whitehead

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