Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys) returns to Symphony Space with his latest novel, which The New York Times calls "a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs." A brilliant love letter to 1960s Harlem, Harlem Shuffle is a multigenerational family saga in the guise of a crime thriller, intricately plotted and richly detailed. ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere) joins to lead the discussion, and actor Calvin Leon Smith (The Underground Railroad) performs an excerpt from the novel.
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Ticket buyers will receive 15% off their copy of Harlem Shuffle when they order online for shipping or in-store pickup from Greenlight Bookstore in advance of the event. The discount code will be provided with your ticket confirmation. Signed books will also be available on site on December 14.
Symphony Space is committed to the health and safety of its artists, staff, and audience. The author's books will be available for purchase, but there will not be a signing line at this event.
Colson Whitehead is the number one New York Times bestselling author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2020, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys and was recently honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. His latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, was published in September.
ZZ Packer is an author whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, and have been published in The Best American Short Stories and read on Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts. Packer is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A graduate of Yale, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford University. Packer is the author of the bestselling collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.
Calvin Leon Smith can be seen in the role of Jasper in Amazon’s The Underground Railroad, a recurring guest star on Season 3 of HBO's The Deuce, and was featured on HBO's High Maintenance in its final season. His theater credits include work at The Public Theatre, The Long Wharf Theatre, The Clarence Brown Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, La Jolla Playhouse, and Shakespeare on the Sound. Smith is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the British American Drama Academy, and a 2018 graduate of The Juilliard School, where he received his MFA in Acting.
At the Thalia Book Club, readers and writers meet for intimate conversations about compelling new books and favorite classics in fiction, essay, biography and more. Evenings include an actor performing an excerpt, an interview, and a conversation with the audience.
Group discounts are available for groups of fifteen people or more. Please contact the Box Office.
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