Books by Paul Beatty

';A thousand-miles-an-hour hoot.' Esquire ';Hilariousand immensely moving.' The New Yorker ';A blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life.' New York Times White Boy Shuffle is Man Booker-winner Paul Beatty's electrifying debut novel about teenage-surf-bum Gunnar Kaufman who is forced to wise up when his mother moves from suburban Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighbourhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a ';divided, downtrodden people'. A bombastic coming-of-age novel that has the uncanny ability to make readers want to laugh and cry at the same time,Beatty mingles horrific reality with wild fancy in this outlandish, laugh-out-loud funny and poignant vision of contemporary America.

';Beatty insistently finds poetry in the projects, dignity on the street.' Guardian ';Beatty's blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence [is] transfixing' New York Times ';The writing here is seamless and teeming with momentum' New York Times Book Review Winston ';Tuffy' Foshay is a 19-year-old, 24-stone ';player-king' to a hapless gang in Spanish Harlem, a denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs. His best friend is a disabled Muslim man who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and his wife he married over the phone whilst in jail. When the frustrated Tuffy agrees to run for City Council, so begins a zany, riotous concoction of nonstop hip-hop chatter and brilliant mainstream social satire, as the indomitable Beatty again demonstrates why he is hailed as one of the shrewdest cultural commentators and hilarious cutups of his generation.

';Shockingly original' The Times ';A literary freestyler with brio to burnscabrous and very funny' Guardian ';A no-holds-barred comedic romp' Junot Diaz After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, a little known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods and the Berlin Wall in search of his artistic and spiritual other. Ferocious, bombastic and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is the second novel from Man Booker-winner Paul Beatty, a comic genius at the top of his game.

A Book of the Decade, 2010-2020 (Independent) ';Outrageous, hilarious and profound.' Simon Schama, Financial Times ';The longer you stare at Beatty's pages, the smarter you'll get.' Guardian ';The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read.' New York Times A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged psychological studies. He is told that his father's work will lead to a memoir that will solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed in a drive-by shooting, he discovers there never was a memoir. All that's left is a bill for a drive-through funeral. What's more, Dickens has literally been wiped off the map to save California from further embarrassment. Fuelled by despair, the narrator sets out to right this wrong with the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court. In his trademark absurdist style, which has the uncanny ability to make readers want to both laugh and cry, The Sellout is an outrageous and outrageously entertaining indictment of our time.