NPR praises Whitehead’s willingness to tackle national “wounds that still haven’t healed” and declares that, in his latest novel, “Colson Whitehead's talent and range are beyond impressive and impossible to ignore." 

Hayes discusses which non-poetic works have most inspired him, and why he believes “writers should fully embrace the idea of persona, of never being fully who you are, or almost who you are.”

In the New Yorker, Karr describes her own experience with a “shockingly casual” sexual assault and explains why “guys who make creepy comments on the streets aren’t just oafs.”

Whitehead discusses how fatherhood has impacted his writing and the importance of cautious hope.

The National Post declares that Parks’s story of a black man forced to serve in the Confederate army during the Civil War is “exhilaratingly ambitious” and proclaims the play “has the feel of greatness.”

For the literary podcast, Jackson discusses the one book his prison library had written by a black author, and how reading while incarcerated inspired his later novel.

For The New Yorker, Wayne parodies an overly tense pilot who advises passengers to “not look out the window – trust me.”

Whitehead discusses how the movie 12 Years A Slave affected his writing process and where he focused his research for The Underground Railroad.

Essay Daily writes that Ruefle’s prose “makes you laugh aloud, and, in the same beat, breaks your heart” and declares that “an entire book” could be written on the magnitude of her new collection's title piece.

The New Republic explores the complex history of slave literature, discussing the ways in which “Whitehead interrogates the silences in history to force a twenty-first-century audience to see the violent reality anew.”