The Sellout
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
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The narrator is a Black urban farmer raised by a sociologist father who used him as a behavioral experiment, in the Los Angeles farming community of Dickens. After Dickens is wiped off the map, he tries to put it back by reintroducing segregation at the high school and ends up at the Supreme Court.
Yes. The Sellout won the 2016 Booker Prize. Paul Beatty was the first American writer to win the prize after it was opened to U.S. authors. The novel also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yes. The Sellout is satirical comedy about a Black narrator in California who tries to reinstate slavery and segregation as a provocation. The tone is fierce and absurdist throughout.
The Sellout was written by Paul Beatty, published in 2015 by Oneworld Publications.
The Sellout is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sellout takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Sellout is a standalone novel by Paul Beatty, not part of a series.
The Sellout is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
