Colson Whitehead in Conversation about Cool Machine

• Date: Saturday, November 14, 2026
• Start time: 12:15 PM
• Run time: 45 minutes
• Location: First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity St, Austin, TX 78701
• Book-bundled tickets include a copy of Cool Machine, pre-signed by the author. There will be no public signing after this event. Books will be available for sale on-site in the BookPeople Sales Tent.
• Please note: Each ticket purchase includes entry for one guest.

If you buy a ticket and are unable to attend:

• We will hold your book at BookPeople for 30 days after the event.
• We understand that things happen, but please only order a ticket if you currently plan to attend. Tickets are not to be used in place of pre-orders, etc.

Guidelines:

• Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Texas Book Festival reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
• If you have questions about your purchase, please email bookfest@texasbookfestival.org.

About the book:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy

1981: New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983: To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986: Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

About the author:

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twelve works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.

Whitehead will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer and Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Social & Cultural Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin, Jennifer Wilks.

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Please direct all questions to bookfest@texasbookfestival.org

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