Yay, Colson Whitehead won a Macarthur genius grant. I read his first novel, The Intuitionist, on a weathered Adirondack chair on the porch of a Nags Head beach house rented by my parents in 1999. It was the most original and intriguing book I'd read in years. God bless the librarians who put it on the "staff picks" shelf at Tenleytown Public Library. God bless librarians, period. John Henry Days is good, too.