If you havent read double-Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, start with these books

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Set us as preferred Reading List If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.This month, “Cool Machine,” a riff on 1980s New York in the form of a tightly plotted crime novel, arrives from Colson Whitehead.It concludes his Harlem trilogy, they say.

If you’d told readers two decades ago that Whitehead would become a bestselling crime novelist, they might have thought you were kidding.He started out writing innovative novels with such intellectual and stylistic punch that the MacArthur Foundation gave him a fellowship in 2002.

His written output is fun, fearless and fantastic.Where to start? Here’s a cheat sheet.For N.Y.

loversWith “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead begins his crime trilogy in the 1960s in a furniture store with stylish midcentury stock whose owner, Ray Carney, is trying not to be a fence.Love the evocation of Harlem as a place with a cool interconnected community.

Worry about that cousin who’s always trouble.The follow-up, “Crook Manifesto,” is set in the 1970s.

All of New York City is at a nadir; Ray is on the straight and narrow, but needs an influx of cash (for Jackson Five tickets for his daughter).Then comes “Cool Machine,” secrets to be revealed when it hit shelves this week .

And as a bonus, his essay collection “The Colossus of New York,” which is vivid, episodic and yet still a story: “Talking about New York is talking about the world.” To break your heartThe novel “The Underground Railroad” comes from an imagined misunderstanding, logical for anyone who grew up riding subways: that the path to freedom for enslaved people that we call The Underground Railroad was in fact underground.In Whitehead’s hands, that imagining takes us through both time and place while making visceral the horrors of enslavement.

The book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and w...