Wildly funny but deadly serious, Beatty’s caper is populated by outrageous caricatures, and its damning social critique carries the day. Beatty gleefully catalogues offensive racial stereotypes but also reaches further, questioning what exactly constitutes black identity in America. While his logic may be skewed, there is a perverse method in his madness he is aided by Hominy, a former child star from The Little Rascals, who insists that Me take him as his slave. When Dickens is erased from the map by gentrification, Me hatches a modest proposal to bring it back by segregating the local school. At the novel’s opening, its narrator, a black farmer whose last name is Me, has been hauled before the Supreme Court for keeping a slave and reinstituting racial segregation in Dickens, an inner-city neighborhood in Los Angeles inexplicably zoned for agrarian use. In 1990, Paul Beatty was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam. He is a 1980 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California. Beatty received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. 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. Paul Beatty (born 1962 in Los Angeles) is a contemporary African-American author. Beatty’s satirical latest (after Slumberland) is a droll, biting look at racism in modern America. The Sellout is the first book by an American author to win the UK's prestigious Man Booker Prize.
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