Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem with a long-running side hustle. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy follows the character as he descends into crime across decades in a rapidly changing New York.
Cool Machine is the third and final book in that series. In today’s episode, Whitehead speaks with
Weekend Edition’s Ayesha Rascoe about Carney as a divided soul. They also chat about gentrification in 1980s Harlem and how Whitehead brought his own version of New York into the world of the book.
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