Welcome to NPR's book of the day. Great reads handpicked every day from NPR.

To kick us off, Morning Edition's Noel King talks with prize-winning author Colson Whitehead

about his latest book, Harlem Shuffle. It's a style you may not have heard from him before.

It's fun. Eagle Parts crime novel, family saga, and love letter to the city he grew up in.

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Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

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Colson Whitehead's last two books won Pulitzer Prizes. The Underground Railroad was about

slavery and escape. The Nickel Boys was about a reform school in Florida where boys were

brutalized. So it's possible to forget that Colson Whitehead can be very funny. His new book,

Harlem Shuffle, is the story of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman trying to walk the straight

and narrow in early 60s, New York. But Ray is drawn by family, friends, circumstance, and his own

ambition into some crooked scenarios, including a heist at the most glamorous hotel in Harlem.

Colson Whitehead told me this departure from very heavy themes was kind of a

relief. I'd like to be able to make my my weird jokes, and sometimes the subject matter

allows me to do that. The Underground Railroad, the Nicola Boys, didn't really have room for

some of my strange humor sometimes. And so the crime genre, the heist novel, allowed me to

exercise that muscle once again. Is it different in some way, better in some way, emotionally

healthier in some way, to write a book with less heavy themes? Or does that not really play into it?

It does. I mean, you know, it ends up playing out. I usually do a lighter book and then a heavier

...