Will I love The Sellout?

I first found this unique novel while browsing at a brick-and-mortar counterpart to Shepherd, namely, Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. I reread it this year because I loved it so much the first time. I doubt there are many other winners of the Man Booker Prize that are less well-known or more laugh-out-loud funny. The Sellout is a satire, ultimately about the meaning of blackness and segregation in an allegedly post-racial America, written in sharp, biting, ecstatic, jive-articulate first-person prose. The narrator is an educated, beta male black farmer raising artisanal weed, square watermelons, satsumas, and other succulent fruit on… show more.

A daring satire on race, politics, and cultural identity in America that somehow manages to be both outrageous and deeply sobering.

Beatty’s voice is like Richard Pryor meets Zora Neale Hurston—sharp, fearless, acerbic, wickedly funny, and incredibly smart.

Notably, although Beatty is an American writer, his book was published in the UK (likely because America prefers to live in denial about race) and went on to win the Booker Prize in 2016.

Reading this book felt like being slapped awake and then daring to laugh about it. Beatty doesn’t just push boundaries… he burns the map. His writing is so fast and so layered that I had to reread entire pages just to catch the joke hiding inside the wound.

What hit me hardest was how fearless it is. The satire is brutal, yes, but never cruel. It’s the kind of book that forces you to sit with your complicity and full-throatedly admit you’re part of the mess. I finished it feeling smarter, shaken, and wildly alive. It’s one of the only… show more.

I like books that invite us to face up to uncomfortable truths. And I love books that do this with satire and humor.

This book is a beautifully written, absurdist commentary on American racism. The novel’s hilarious and absurd plot and its unreliable narrator open big windows to the realities of life in a society that so often chooses to deny, rather than to examine, the many ways in which racism fractures, lacerates and scars.

The humor of The Sellout is smart, nonstop, dark, and painful. The author is direct and ruthless as he revels in the high price a… show more.

If I had to use one word to describe The Sellout, it would be “charged”. 

The Sellout tells the story of a young black man who lost his father to a police shooting. As he attempts to cope with this new reality, his hometown is gradually fading into oblivion. To salvage what’s left of it, he decides on the craziest plan: reinstating slavery. An action that will drag our protagonist to the Supreme Court’s doorsteps.

Unconventional and wild, The Sellout is one of the best social commentaries on America’s racial issues you’ll ever read. I guarantee it, I stand… show more.

I grew up in the United States and lived there until I was 21, and like many people my age, I was brainwashed into believing that because slavery ended in 1865, and because the civil rights movement of the 1960s successfully advanced the rights of Black people, that the issue of racism in America was mostly resolved. I know I know – this is remarkably ignorant, and yet this narrative is also the one driving conservatives who are actively eroding Black voting rights, blocking meaningful criminal justice reform, banning books about racism, opposing the establishment of a social safety net,… show more.

The Sellout is a satirical treatise on the lengths humans will go to reject, deny, or literally erase, injustice. It skewers any pretense of a post-racial America, telling the story of a small town in California that brings back segregation and slavery. The outlandish uproar that ensues reveals the deep division that persists in America and the discomfort in addressing it.