The Nickel Boys (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition) (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Colson Whitehead

Overview

This Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition includes a letter to readers from Colson Whitehead, as well as a discussion guide.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385545358
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	176,865
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Colson Whitehead is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, he lives in New York City.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, NY

Date of Birth:

November 6, 1969

Place of Birth:

New York, NY

Education:

Harvard College, BA in English & American Literature

Website:

http://www.colsonwhitehead.com

Editorial Reviews

The Nickel Boys—a tense, nervy performance—is even more rigorously controlled than [The Underground Railroad]. The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into water. Every chapter hits its marks. Even if your prose taste runs to curlicue and adornment (mine does), the restraint feels significant. Whitehead comports himself with gravity and care, the steward of painful, suppressed histories; his choices on the page can feel as much ethical as aesthetic…Whitehead has written novels of horror and apocalypse; nothing touches the grimness of the real stories he conveys here, of a cinder-block building that still stands…Its starkness and irresolution recalls the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's point that the opposite of forgetting is not merely remembrance. It is justice.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

…[Whitehead] has now produced back-to-back historical novels, in the broadest definition of that term, that in sum offer an epic account of America's penchant for paying lip service to its original sin while failing to face its full horror and its undying legacy of recidivism…He applies a master storyteller's muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or "neatly erase" the stories he is driven to tell…At a little over 200 pages, The Nickel Boys is even leaner than [The Underground Railroad] and no less devastating…The elasticity of time in [the novel] feels so organic that only when you put the book down do you fully appreciate that its sweep encompasses much of the last century as well as this one. While Whitehead doesn't reprise the wholesale magic realism of his previous novel…he does pull off a brilliant sleight-of-hand that elevates the mere act of resurrecting Elwood's buried story into at once a miracle and a tragedy.

The New York Times Book Review - Frank Rich