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Overview
Overview
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal 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.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Beatty, Paul
- ISBN: 9781250808240
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 8.27 x 0.81
- Number Of Pages: 304
- Publication Year: 2021
Language:
English
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Racial Insensitivity in the Upside-Down Universe of Paul Beatty
David F. - 6 years 4 months agoPaul Beatty's The Sellout is a scathing, satirical exploration of race & political correctness in the U.S. today. Beatty spares no one while delivering his political punches encased in language so racially charged, that if they were not being delivered by an African American writer would quickly be deemed not worthy of publication. He requires the reader to suspend their belief systems and accept into their reading experience a protagonist whose moral bearing is suspect form the word go. Beatty apparently believes that the reader will understand the necessity of accepting that everything presented within his work is designed to outrage & entertain in the same breath. I laughed out loud at many of his passages & gasped at the racial audacity & insensitivity of many others. Without a doubt, this novel is not for everyone, but definitely. for those possessing a perverse sense of sardonic humor, The Sellout is worth the sale.