This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Many novelists—including some great ones—circle one subject and style for much of their career. Colson Whitehead isn’t among them. He has written a zombie novel, a fantastical escape-from-slavery narrative, a supernatural elevator-inspector thriller, and, most recently, a trilogy of heist capers that concludes with Cool Machine, which comes out on Tuesday. The critic David Hajdu, in a new Atlantic article, describes the book as “crime fiction without apology” that entertains “for the sake of a moral imperative.” Don’t mistake Whitehead’s restlessness for aimlessness; his knack for pinballing among genres has marked out an instructive path for adventurous authors—he’s taken a joyously circuitous journey toward literary mastery.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:A free-speech meltdownPunctuation: a generational divide“The Scrubbed and Simple Moon,” a poem by Carol FrostThe Odyssey was never about the godsThis mastery took decades to achieve. Whitehead’s first three novels earned him a reputation as a deft satirist of the transactional cultural ecosystem of the aughts—but one who could fall into the glibness he was sending up. His second novel, John Henry Days, features a modern-day version of the titular folk hero—intent on breaking a record not for the sledgehammering of steel but for consecutive days attending PR events. The critic James Wood thought that it was a work lacking introspection, “full of noise and irrelevant intensity.” Whitehead responded, characteristically, with a parody in Harper’s of a Wood review. But over time, he developed a more sophisticated response: He made his work deeper.In 2009’s Sag Harbor, Whitehead fictionalized his happy but precarious summers in a Black middle-class enclave on Eastern Long Island. After another genre detour—the 2011 zombie-apocalypse novel Zone One—he wrote two books about America’s brutal, racist history. The Underground Railroad made that 19th-century route to freedom literal, transforming it into a train track that brought fugitives through a series of alternate realities; The Nickel Boys turned the true story of an abusive Southern reform school into a painful coming-of-age adventure. Both novels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Moving from such heavy topics to a crime-fiction series might seem to represent another diversion. But every turn back to genre tropes has brought out new depths from the author. Whitehead has (thank goodness) a lot of nostalgic fun with the capers of the semi-criminal furniture salesman Ray Carney—who else would name Part II of an entire book after New York City’s beloved local-news anchor Sue Simmons? But, as Hajdu points out, Whitehead’s treatment of his native city has evolved over the years. In an essay from 2003’s The Colossus of New York, Whitehead sneers at hipsters praying to “Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture”; in his latest book, he is more sympathetic, imagining a New York newcomer staring into “the scabby face of a future self” on the street. The “snarl” of the early reference is replaced, Hajdu writes, with the “richer, more sordid majesty” of the latter.The Harlem Trilogy, Hajdu writes, has “little interest in irony or distancing effects.” The author of the series bears the same curiosity, quick wit, and linguistic dexterity as the younger man who wrote Zone One and 2006’s messy farce, Apex Hides the Hurt. But Whitehead has the maturity that comes from, say, building the astonishing world of The Underground Railroad; he’s been around the block a few more times, and become a more complex and more intriguing future self.Illustration by Day BrièrreThe Unapologetic Crime Fiction of Colson WhiteheadBy David HajduThe Harlem Trilogy concludes with big questions about the moral universe.Read the full article.What to ReadThe Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanonne JeffersAlthough this book was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, it could easily have been categorized as biography. As both a work of life-writing and a book about the challenges of writing, it may have no equal. Focusing on the groundbreaking 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, the collection reimagines her childhood in West Africa, her existence with her white American enslavers, her friendships and her marriage to John Peters, and, in the volume’s haunting final poem, her death at roughly the age of 31. The volume concludes with a learned essay reflecting on the possibilities and the perils of biographical writing: Jeffers questions, for example, the historical account of a 19th-century white woman who claims to be related to Wheatley’s enslaver, as well as racist accounts of Wheatley’s husband in early biographies. By moving through and beyond several genres, this book joins a rich new tradition of what the scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” a mode of imaginative writing that fills in gaps of African American history, correcting misrepresentations along the way.From our list: Eights of the most fascinating biographies to readOut Next Week📚 Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins📚 Country of Lords, by Kim Phillips-Fein📚 Livia: Mother of Rome, by Caitlin C. GillespieYour Weekend ReadIllustration by Janik SöllnerReading a 3,000-Year-Old Poem to a 3-Year-Old BoyBy Chris MoodyThe Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a children’s book. The poem’s structure can confound even an adult reader. It does not open with “Once upon a time,” but rather in medias res, as a committee of gods discusses a war that the author expects you to know about already. By the time the story gets to Odysseus’s plight—Homer assumes you’ve heard of him, too—his journey unravels like a Quentin Tarantino film: It starts near the end and then shifts back and forth in time. Some parts of the plot are also not especially kid-appropriate. Characters trip on drugs. A giant’s eye gets poked out with a red-hot stake. Odysseus is unfaithful to his wife. Goodnight Moon this is not.Read the full article.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.Explore all of our newsletters.