Writers Read: Linda Kass

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Linda Kass

Linda Kass began her career as a magazine journalist and correspondent for regional and national publications. Along with her new

novel, World News from Waverley High, she is the author of three previous works of historical fiction: Tasa’s Song (2016), A Ritchie Boy (2020), and Bessie (2023). A longtime civic leader, she is the founder and owner of Gramercy Books, an independent bookstore in Central Ohio. Kass lives in Columbus with her husband, Frank; they have four children, six grandchildren, and a labradoodle named Wally.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Kass's reply:

I recently finished back-to-back readings of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, third in his crime trilogy set in New York. I was left with an impression that Whitehead’s Ray Carney had some aligned traits, or at least parallels, with Morrison’s Mason Dead II, both Black businessmen who make property, commerce, and respectability central to their identities. But this is something I need to contemplate further. To review each:

Song of Solomon was written in 1977 and Morrison’s third novel after The Bluest Eye and Sula. It’s a deep and sprawling story that blends magical realism, folklore, and poetic prose. It follows Macon "Milkman" Dead III (Macon Dead II’s son) on a coming-of- age journey from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins as it explores identity formation and evolution, intergenerational family trauma, and African American heritage. The characters are rich but flawed from Milkman and his self-absorbed youth to his estranged and mystical aunt Pilate and the complex women who carry the emotional weight of the narrative. I love Morrison’s attention to detail, especially in expressing tense emotion and speech. The novel covers nearly a century of American history—the early chapters are set in Michigan in the early 1930s—as it affects a single family. If the first half of the novel reveals how Milkman grows up into chaos and genuine danger, the second part is one of flight where he is flung out of his private maelstrom and forced to discover, explore, comprehend, and accept a world more dangerous than the ghetto neighborhood known as Blood Bank (filled with eccentrics, whores, bullies, and lunatics) which he visited as a boy. This latter section is both Milkman’s liberating escape from generational trauma and his dangerous abandonment of loved ones. Although it begins as a hungry hunt for a cache of gold that his father and Pilate left in a cave in Virginia, Milkman’s search is finally a search for family history.

In Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead concludes one of the richest portraits of New York — his entertaining trilogy of novels that opened in the late 1950s with Harlem Shuffle and chronicled a changing Harlem over a thirty-year span in the 20th century. This third volume is full of heists and cultural shifts while portraying 1980s New York during the exact years I lived in the city. We again meet up with protagonist Ray Carney, a furniture salesman who can’t help but be drawn into the criminal underworld despite his mainstream aspirations. Whitehead’s versatility as a writer is unmatched and this novel continues the author’s spirited, yarn-like quality that makes this story, as the first two, as fun to read as it is to think about. From a noir detective story to an auto fictional coming-of-age tale, from a zombie apocalypse novel to profound literary historical fiction based on true events, Whitehead’s voice remains distinctive and his prose is consistently precise, assured, and pitch perfect. Cool Machine follows this vital path.