This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review.

This week I'm speaking to one of America's most exciting and lauded writers, Holsen Whitehead.

He is the winner of two Pulitzer prizes for fiction, joining a club composed of only,

and this is for all you trivia enthusiasts out there, William Fockner, John Updike, and

Booth Tarkington.

Whitehead's Pulitzers were for the historical novels the Underground Railroad and the

Nickel Boys.

He's back with Crook Manifesto, a sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle.

That book was set in 1960s Harlem, and this one takes place about a decade later.

Both star Ray Carney, a furniture salesman whose father was a low-level criminal.

Ray is the first in his family to go to college, makes a proper life for himself, and yet,

there's something in him that can't keep him away from the criminal elements.

As Whitehead writes in his first novel, Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being

crooked in practice and ambition.

On this week's episode, I speak to Whitehead about crime novels, New York in the 1970s,

and how he comes up with all those wacky Crook names.

I am here with Colson Whitehead, author of the new novel Crook Manifesto, Colson Welcome.

How'd you do?

It drives me nuts when an interview opens with a question, so why did you decide to write this book?

It feels like a cheap question, but I certainly had to ask something equally stiff,

which is, tell us what Crook Manifesto is about.

Crook Manifesto is the second book in what I guess I call the Harlem trilogy.

...