Past the City Limit Sign: The Role of Rural in 2016 Books
What kinds of stories will emerge that focus on rural or city settings during a Trump presidency? Will the typical themes continue to be cemented or will variations become the norm?
The Sellout
Round-Up: Man Booker Prize, Bob Dylan Breaks Nobel Silence, and Stephen King’s New Picture Book
From the Man Booker Prize winner to Stephen King’s new picture book, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines: Paul Beatty won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout following a unanimous decision by the judges. Beatty is the first American to win the prize, which was expanded in 2014 to accept books by authors…
The Year In Humor
2015 was an awful, depressing year for current events. The violence was so widespread that to reduce it to a single sentence like this is to vastly undermine the scale and gravitas of human suffering endured. With California out of water and the unsettling winter heat wave currently afflicting East Coast, it’s hard not to…
Hilarious Discomfort: On Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”
The Sellout — Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus & Giroux March 2015 304 pages Buy now I sat down to read Paul Beatty’s new satirical novel The Sellout knowing I was going to write about it. In fact, I had committed to writing about it. I had pitched it; it was my idea. This knowledge, in conjunction with the book’s…