I used to be a critic at the Village Voice in the early ’90s and I sort of wrote like that when I was doing my TV and book and music reviews. What’s it like to write this style of nonfiction?įor me just to have a voice that is sort of limber and vernacular was very fun. He spoke to Salon about zombies, fiction, poker and some of his other interests. Whitehead is a rare creature in the landscape of contemporary fiction: a critical darling with a genuine and voracious appetite for popular culture. At one point, after binging on nocturnal poker shows and crashing on the couch, he observes that sleeping on the sofa reminds him of his recently ended marriage. It’s a comic dissection of a subculture in the tradition of David Foster Wallace’s best nonfiction, but some personal information also seeps out. What’s striking about his vision of a fallen New York City is how little has changed: It’s still hard to find a cab, gentrification and consumerism are resurgent, and a general feeling of futility suffuses most endeavors.Īfter his zombie novel, “Zone One,” Whitehead plunged into the world of professional poker to research his new book, “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death” (out this month). For Colson Whitehead, though, evoking hordes of the undead streaming through the streets was just another way of describing life in the big city. Writing a zombie novel set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan would not strike most authors as an autobiographical project.
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