Paul Beatty is the first American to win the Man Booker Prize

>existentialist crisis
Fuck off, googly eyes.

These days I'm never sure what's a parody and what's real.

More like Pynchon-dark, amirite?

>The Sellout, a challenging satire on US race relations

Godammnit America, you are completely obsessed.

I'd say the same thing, but he was on the PBS Newshour and he really seemed like a regular guy who got shoehorned into the usual "black guy writin' about black stuff" role.

pbs.org/newshour/bb/paul-beatty-sellout/

>bunch of skinheads criticizing black authors
>never read black authors
>small penises and low salaries

never change Veeky Forums

This

Just write good books. Fuck your ethnicity. We have enough cunts like Junot Diaz already

He seems like a pretty down to earth guy. I'm happy for him. Is the book any good?

Sounds like he's Our Guy (tm).

Thanks Reddit, how's things with you?

>Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles--the narrator of The Sellout 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.

holy kek

I just finished it. I'm amazed that an American won the Man Booker - I thought they were anathema to the Commonwealth-centric judges.

Pynchon? I can see the influence, but that's not what came to mind most often whilst I was reading it. What came to mind most often was "Holy crap this is just like Confederacy of Dunces." Seriously, it's like Confederacy of Dunces if it was written about a black millennial. The main character is an autist, albeit one not quite so lost as our patron-saint Ignatius, and much of the humour is derived from watching him try to interact with a world beyond his grasp and which is unable to grasp him. It's less meta-referential than Pynchon, more slapstick than slick, and has more to say about the absurdity of modern life than about race relations.

Ultimately I recommend it, but perhaps if you're an American it's too close to the bone for the humour to really shine through. You might get stuck only reading it as an ingratiating allegory, which it is in some parts, but overall 'The Sellout' owes more to John Kennedy Toole than Thomas Pynchon.

Why did they decide to include Americans in the award?

She's making it sound good.

I swear these sjw cucks are anti smoking 2.0
Whatever they say, the opposite sounds cool

Cool. Might check it out, A Brief History of Seven Killings was fun enough.

desu I agree, at least in the sense that as long as their books are so focused on racism/post-colonialism, they're limiting themselves and making it hard to say anything that hasn't already been said. Probably a generalization, but certainly my experience.

So it's a fucking Family Guy episode. Wonderful.

I haven't read it yet, but how the fuck does that sound like a Family guy episode? Have you even read Confederacy of Dunces?

It's very, very good, the problem is idiots who haven't read the book are pigeonholing him into the "feel good, Color Purple, Maya Angelou, black guy writes about bein' black" category. The book is zanily offensive. It's as likely to offend so-called SJWs as it is right-wingers. He effectively satirises extant racism and patronising liberal pandering with equal verve. I thought it was too edgy to win.

eh... this is a bit unfair to say. Sure, many are obsessed with slavery and racism etc. like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Some are middle of the road like Ishmael Reed. But some are truly amazing like Ralph Ellison, Jay Wright, James Baldwin, etc, who are still forced to be considered "black obsessed" for writing good works which are simply about black people because they lived in black areas. Imagine that!

I agree that the usually peddled "black authors" suck ass in general, but many are great. If Paul Beattie won the man booker fair and square (I'm sure he did), then I'm sure he wrote a good but hardly experimental and/or amazing novel. Upper middlebrow material. Man Booker picks safe, but high quality novels to peddle to postgraduate single women, basically. No reason for outrage.

Except everyone in the thread before your post doesn't mind the guy