Anyone read The Sellout by Paul Beatty?

[thatrapsfan]

Just finished this novel and its Best novel I've read in ages. Like if Chappelle wrote a book. Takes shot at white liberals, black intellectuals, politicians, everything. Great satire.

Here's are some reviews:

What Happens When a Black Man Brings Segregation Back? Hilarity.

'The Sellout' Is A Scorchingly Funny Satire On 'Post-Racial' America

 

[Igloo Stix]

I'm gonna read it soon, breh. Loved The White Boy Shuffle.

 

[thatrapsfan]

I'm gonna read it soon, breh. Loved The White Boy Shuffle.

First Beatty book Ive read, but definitely going to read White Boy Shuffle now.


Apparently Phil Jackson gave Kobe that book to read back in the day

Phil Jackson, back when he was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, gave Kobe Bryant a copy of Beatty’s book, ostensibly because Kaufman’s fish-out-of-water upbringing reminded Jackson of Bryant’s childhood in Italy. Bryant would later say that he enjoyed reading it, though he didn’t appreciate Jackson’s assumptions about his life. Maybe he felt like his coach was calling his blackness into question as well. “The White Boy Shuffle” was published at the high point of nineteen-nineties multiculturalism—Gunnar, the ultimate “cultural mulatto,” attends a P.C.-obsessed school called Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary—and the novel was knowingly inauthentic. Yet despite the whimsical deconstruction of blackness and identity and the self-aware iconoclasm of Beatty’s anti-heroes, the same revelation awaits: America will never allow you to be as free as you dream of being, even if those dreams are personal, small, and involve something as simple as not picking up a basketball.