1971. Ray Carney’s days moving stolen goods are over. It’s strictly the straight-and-narrow for him --- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter and decides to hit up his old police contact, Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney. 1973. Pepper is Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime who takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, celebrity drug dealers, hustlers, mobsters and hit men. 1976. Carney's wife, Elizabeth, is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A. and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it.

To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can he avoid getting killed; save his cousin, Freddie, who falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa (the “Waldorf of Harlem”); and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood --- where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood --- where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned --- Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In 2011, Grantland magazine sent Colson Whitehead to brave the harrowing, seven-day gauntlet of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. There was just one hitch: he had never played in a casino tournament before. With just six weeks to train, Whitehead plunged into the gritty subculture of Texas Hold'em, writing what began as a series of articles and has been expanded into THE NOBLE HUSTLE.

After a pandemic devastates the planet, humanity is mostly divided between the living and the living dead. As survivors attempt to restore Manhattan, Mark Spitz and his civilian squad must confront “malfunctioning” stragglers --- those caught in between the living and the undead.

Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. Benji will be tested by contests big and small. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages.