The Sellout

Round-Up: Man Booker Prize, Bob Dylan Breaks Nobel Silence, and Stephen King’s New Picture Book

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

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”
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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…