Paul Beatty recommends
Victim (2024)Andrew Boryga"Blazingly trenchant, unflinchingly Bronx, Boryga's the rare writer who knows sometimes it's in the unlearning where real education begins. Victim diddy-bops into your skull; smooth, cool, fun-loving and knowing full well a sense of humor always trumps one's sense of entitlement. Break night with this one - it isn't to be missed."The Lemon (2022)S E Boyd"S. E. Boyd has taken the secret ingredient to fame--'shameless persistence'--and used it to pressure-cook up a novel funny enough and hot enough to singe the high brows off of any raised-pinkie foodie." The Confessions of Matthew Strong (2022)Ousmane K Power-Greene"The grandeur of the Harlem Renaissance beautifully backgrounds The Confessions of Matthew Strong. Fitting because, like Rudolph Fisher and Zora Neale Hurston, Power-Greene knows from slave shackle to noose to the nightly news, the black experience in America has been a perpetual crime story. This moving and exceedingly sharp thriller shreds the pretense that America's murderous history is a 'whodunit' and not a 'wedunit.'" Six Days in Rome (2022)Francesca Giacco"Sensorial as hell... An ode to funky wine labels, good taste, and true inspiration, Francesca Giacco has penned a stunningly cool and stylish debut." Everything Abridged (2022)Dennard Dayle"Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative, like the best modernist literature, Everything Abridged is a powerful celebration of flaw and failure. It's a book that revels in the timelessness of obsolescence and the freedom of powerlessness. Dayle's a genre-shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain. This refreshingly original and powerfully funnycollection is a debut to remember." Little Foxes Took Up Matches (2022)Katya Kazbek"Sometimes in the face of perversity, neglect, and growing up in a rundown Moscow flat one-bedroom too small, one needs to do their own myth-making. And in this unflinching, yet achingly humorous look at millennial Russia, Katya Kazbek celebrates a wonderfully heroic self-deification. Proving we can become the gods and goddesses this world truly needs." Brown Girls (2022)Daphne Palasi Andreades"Wonderfully New York-centric in both voice and attitude - Brown Girls flows like a late night FM-radio dedication to the crew, the block, and the mission. This book's a gift - a smooth subway seat on a crowded Queens local bound to everywhere and offered to those people, places, and dreams that forever keep and feed us, because memory-like off-brand bodega cottage cheese - has no expiration date. This one's a ride - watch the open doors." Future Feeling (2021)Joss Lake"Smartly set in a strange, yet familiar American offscape, Lake's novel weaves a tantric tale that measures the timelessness of trans identities not in well-intentioned DSM diagnoses, civil rights movements, or social media pedantries, but by cherishing the fissures in the rock wall of intersectionality. For as Future Feeling proves, it's in these misalignments, misunderstandings, and inappropriate joking where we have space to be ourselves." The Committed (2021)(Sympathizer, book 2)Viet Thanh Nguyen"An elegy to idealism, Orientalism, and existentialism in all its tragic forms, Nguyen’s novel doesn’t so much inhabit early eighties Paris, as it pulls the plug on the City of Light. Think of The Committed as the declaration of the 20th ½ Arrondissement. A squatter’s paradise for those with one foot in the grave and the other shoved halfway up Western civilization’s ass." American Spy (2019)Lauren Wilkinson"Echoing the stoic cynicism of Hurston and Ellison, and the verve of Conan Doyle, American Spy lays our complicities-political, racial, and sexual-bare. Packed with unforgettable characters, it's a stunning book, timely as it is timeless." What We Lose (2017)Zinzi Clemmons"Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life, What We Lose reads like a guided tour through a melancholic Van Gogh exhibit – wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." Anthologies containing stories by Paul Beatty
Awards
| Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing Best Novel nominee (2016) : The Sellout | | Booker Prize Best Novel winner (2016) : The Sellout |
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(b.1962)