Community Book Club—Harlem Shuffle

Are you looking to connect with others? Do you love reading all kinds of books? If you answered yes, the Community Book Club is for you!

We are reading Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny…about race, power, and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked. To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife, Elizabeth, are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home. Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. 

The Community Book Club meets every other Thursday evening, beginning May 19, via Zoom.

To register, send an email to community@iit.edu, and you will receive the meeting credentials.