Crook Manifesto is
a follow-up to Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. This time, set in the 70s, we
return to the world of Ray Carney, now running a more successful and larger
furniture store right on 125th St, in Harlem. And again, Carney is a
cipher for Whitehead to explore the sights, sounds, and humanity of one of
America’s most fascinating, volatile neighborhoods.
Whitehead is at the top of his game here as he captures the styles and rhythms of
the city in all its glorious, bell-bottom 70s groove. Carney’s block of Harlem is a powder keg of crime
and racial tension, with the Black Panthers marching in the streets, corrupt
cops demanding pay for protection, and, of course, more petty crimes and con
artists.
The book is peppered with rich, funny, painful moments and broken lives.
He makes it look so damn easy as his language be-bops along and somehow
magically captures the rhythm of urban life. The first section of the book, where Carney is forced to stick up an underground poker game, is at once wry and
tense and overflowing with gritty splendor.
You don’t need to have read Harlem
Shuffle to enjoy Crook Manifesto, but I guarantee you will want to. Good
news, the third and final is on the way!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.
“Dazzling” –Walter Mosley, The New York Times Book Review.
It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his…
A friend who I share books with all the time and who has directed plays
I wrote, handed me this book and said, "YOU would love this." Always
curious how people perceive my tastes, I opened to the first sentence, and
here's what I got: "They all look the same, hotel bars, even when they don't."
Yep,
I'm in.
Chelsea
Summers' protagonist is telling her story from prison where she will live out
her life for the multiple murders of her lovers. The thing is, she also ate some of
them. But Dorothy Daniels is not your everyday cannibal. She is a deviously
smart self-aware sociopath, culinary master and food critic.
The author has
created a hilarious, perverted and gruesome anti-hero here, and every page drips
with horror and brilliance. Yeah, I said perverted. This book is bawdy and
raunchy as things get, so I wouldn't be recommending this one to grandma.
Unless your grandma's down like that, I don't know.
All
the obvious comparisons apply. Hannibal Lecter by way of Bret Easton Ellis and
with plenty of Raymond Chandler noir similes to go around. The
other delicious layer going on here is a gen-xers wink at the audience about
things like the death of print media and the tragically self-congratulatory
foodie movement which I was especially grateful for.
I
almost did not set this down from the moment I read that first sentence.
One of Vanity Fair's Books That Will Get You Through This Winter “One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory... A Certain Hunger has the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel, as if metaphor-happy Raymond Chandler handed the reins over to the sexed-up femme fatale and really let her fly." ―The New York Times
Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy’s clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one…
As a writer, I have sworn to read all over the place and try to get out of
my comfort zone as much as possible. I also believe that great stories lie in
waiting in many places in many forms. (The Last of Us, a video game, was
the source material for one of the best HBO series last year.) For a long while
I thought I should probably explore the banquet of great work being done in
comics and graphic novels.
(Writers note: If you want to learn a lot about
plotting and economical storytelling, Frank Miller's Batman comics are a
great place to start.)
I was so lucky to have picked up The Department
of Truth from the line at the register at Forbidden Planet here in New York
City. It is a fever dream of conspiracy madness that slowly unwinds what we
believe is the history of our country and our world. A still-alive Lee Harvey
Oswald heads this super-secret branch of the government whose mission seems to
be to control the truth or what the population should believe.
As if that
isn't cool enough, we follow a mysterious woman with red Xs over her eyes as she
supervises the mass murder of some flat earthers, who paid top dollar to be
flown to the edge of the earth. The writing is so rich and smart I regularly
went back and reread whole sections.
Tynion skillfully draws a line through all
the great unprovable mysteries of our culture from bigfoot to Kennedy to Emperor
Constantine changing the calendar and the missing three or four hundred years
that resulted.
The artwork is far from your normal superhero drawings with
lush, haunting full color pages. I don't know what medium the artists use, but
the final result is almost like watercolor.
The Department of Truth could
easily end up being this generation's The Watchmen, and by that I mean,
the one comic that people who never read comics pick up.
Also, the series rights have been optioned, so one
day, it will live on in serialized, televised splendor.
COLE TURNER has studied conspiracy theories all his life, but he isn't prepared for what happens when he discovers that all of them are true: the JFK Assassination, Flat Earth Theory, Bigfoot, Mothman, and so much worse. One organization has been covering them up for generations, controlling the narrative for what they claim is the greater good.
What is the deep, dark secret behind the Department of Truth-and will learning it destroy Cole's life from the inside out?
The first three arcs of the critically acclaimed series by Eisner Award-winning writer JAMES TYNION IV (Something is Killing the Children, The…
“I wasn’t even going to tell this story, but
Violet had to go and write a whole book about all of us before getting herself
killed.”
Ten years ago, Jerry came to NYC to break into
show business. Today, his career is stalled; his ex-fiancé
is a TV star, and he survives by bartending in Manhattan’s cocktail
lounges. Stunned by loss and regret, he is sleepwalking through life when he discovers Violet’s book about when they were young, hopeful
servers at a Times Square restaurant.
Mustering the courage to open it, he
relives the days of callbacks, late nights, angry chefs, and crazy
customers. With unflinching honesty, Brooks exposes the reality of breaking
into show business while living paycheck-to-paycheck in the most expensive city
in America.
