The Sellout (Booker Prize Winner)

The Sellout (Booker Prize Winner)

by Paul Beatty
The Sellout (Booker Prize Winner)

The Sellout (Booker Prize Winner)

by Paul Beatty

Paperback

$14.99  $17.00 Save 12% Current price is $14.99, Original price is $17. You Save 12%.
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Wednesday, April 3
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction


Named 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250083258
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 03/01/2016
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 26,474
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Beatty is the author of the novels Slumberland, Tuff, and The White Boy Shuffle—and the books of poetry: Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. In 2017, he was the winner the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He lives in New York City.
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews