The Sellout: WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016

Beatty, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786070154 ISBN 13: 9781786070159

Publisher: Oneworld Publications, 2016

**WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016** Outrageous, hilarious and profound. Simon Schama, Financial Times The longer you stare at Beatty s pages, the smarter you ll get. Guardian The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I ve read. New York Times A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged psychological studies. He is told that his father s work will lead to a memoir that will solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed in a drive-by shooting, he discovers there never was a memoir. All that s left is a bill for a drive-through funeral. What s more, Dickens has literally been wiped off the map to save California from further embarrassment. Fuelled by despair, the narrator sets out to right this wrong with the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court. In his trademark absurdist style, which has the uncanny ability to make readers want to both laugh and cry, The Sellout is an outrageous and outrageously entertaining indictment of our time.

Review:

The most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read in at least a decade. --Dwight Garner, New York Times

Swiftian satire of the highest order... Giddy, scathing and dazzling. --Wall Street Journal

Brilliant. Amazing. Like demented angels wrote it. Sarah Silverman --Sarah Silverman

From the Author:

Paul Beatty (born 1962 in Los Angeles) is a contemporary African-American author. Beatty received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. He is a 1980 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California. In 1990, Paul Beatty was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. One of the prizes for winning that championship title was the book deal which resulted in his first volume of poetry, Big Bank Takes Little Bank. This would be followed by another book of poetry Joker, Joker, Deuce as well as appearances performing his poetry on MTV and PBS (in the series The United States of Poetry). In 1993, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. His first novel, The White Boy Shuffle received a positive review in The New York Times, the reviewer, Richard Bernstein, called the book "a blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life." His second book, Tuff received a positive notice in Time Magazine. Most recently, Beatty edited an anthology of African-American humor called Hokum and wrote an article in The New York Times on the same subject.