Yesterday, the
National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its book awards for
publishing year 2015. The Fiction winner
is Paul Beatty for The Sellout.
The Sellout is a biting satire about a young man's
isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court. Born in Dickens, on the southern outskirts of
Los Angeles, the narrator 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
right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save
California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most
famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates
the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the
local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court (https://www.amazon.ca/Sellout-Novel-Paul-Beatty/dp/0374260508/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458310977&sr=1-1&keywords=the+sellout).
If you are
interested in the complete list of winners, go to http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/national-book-critics-circle-announces-award-winners-for-publishing-ye1.
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