The Sellout: Winner Of The 2016 Booker Prize (Hb)

Description

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's "The Sellout "showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality--the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles--the narrator of "The Sellout" resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident--the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins--he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Author description

Paul Beatty is the author of three novels--"Slumberland," " Tuff," and "The""White Boy Shuffle"--and two books of poetry: "Big Bank Take Little Bank" and "Joker, Joker, Deuce." He is the editor of "Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor." He lives in New York City.