Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty

African American Literature Book Club - The #1 Site for "Readers of Black Literature"

Home • Back • Author Home • Up • Next • Author Profiles • Book Profiles • Writer's Resources • Reviews • Events • About Us • Buy Any Book • Advertise

Paul Beatty Photo Holy Cross University

I was born in Los Angeles in 1962. Raised on kung fu triple features, samurai movies with no swordplay, V-8, Philly cheesesteak sandwiches from Al's Sandwich Shop, and my mother's frayed paperback library. I write because I'm too afraid to steal, too ugly to act, too weak to fight, and too stupid in math to be a Cosmologist. As a result two volumes of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, and two novels, The White Boy Shuffle and Tuff.

Beatty lives and works in New York. He received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from Boston University.

Slumberland: A Novel
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (June 10, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596912405

The breakout novel from a literary virtuoso about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger.

Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his incisive eye to man’s search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world.

After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, 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, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic—and spiritual—other.

Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.

Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor
Click to order via Amazon

Edited by Paul Beatty

Bloomsbury Publishing (January 10, 2006)
Hardvover, $29.95
480 pages, illus.
ISBN: 1582344345

Read an AALBC.com Review by Kam Williams

Selected and introduced by acclaimed novelist and poet Paul Beatty, Hokum is a liberating, eccentric, savagely comic collection of the funniest writing by black Americans.

This book is less a comprehensive collection of African-American humor than a mix-tape narrative dubbed by a trusted friend—a sampler of underground classics, rare grooves, and timeless summer jams, poetry and prose juxtaposed with the blues, hip-hop, political speeches, and the world’s funniest radio sermon. The subtle musings of Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Harryette Mullen are bracketed by the profane and often loud ruminations of Langston Hughes, Darius James, Wanda Coleman, Tish Benson, Steve Cannon, and Hattie Gossett. Some of the funniest writers don’t write, so included are selections from well-known yet unpublished wits Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mike Tyson, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Selections also come from public figures and authors whose humor, although incisive and profound, is often overlooked: Malcolm X, Suzan-Lori Parks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. Dubois. Groundbreaking, fierce, and hilarious, this is a necessary anthology for any fan or student of American writing, with a huge range and a smart, political grasp of the uses of humor.

The White Boy Shuffle
Click to order via Amazon

Format: Paperback, 240pp.
ISBN: 0805053514
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
Pub. Date: June 1997
Edition Desc: REPRINT

"Every sentence is an exploding firecracker, driving the story along at the speed of computer-light. While it is the funniest novel I've read in years. It's also dead serious, especially as it gained momentum and reaches that incredible, absurd, romantic, and terrifying end." —Clarence Major

In Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, Gunnar Kaufman is an awkward black surfer bum who is moved from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually becomes the reluctant messiah of a "divided, down-trodden people."

Tuff
Click to order via Amazon

Format: Hardcover, 257pp.
ISBN: 0375401229
Publisher: Knopf Alfred A
Pub. Date: May 2000
Edition Desc 1 ED

Read an Excerpt from Tuff

Fueled by the ferocious wit, outrageous comedy, and flat-out rage that made his debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, one of the most passionately reviewed books of 1996 ("A blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of Black American life" --New York Times; "As much in the tradition of Richard Pryor as Ralph Ellison" --The Village Voice), Tuff unleashes Paul Beatty's verbal dazzle and nothing-sacred sensibility on the story of a young black man coming of age on the streets and stoops of Spanish Harlem.

Nineteen-year-old, 320-pound Winston "Tuffy" Foshay -- player king of a motley crew that includes his scheming, disabled best friend, Fariq, otherwise known as Smush; his Beat-poet, Black Panther father, Clifford; Inez, the unreconstructed Marxist revolutionary who raised him; and his bewildered mentor from the Big Brother program, the hapless African-American rabbi Spencer Throckmorton -- is ready to make a change. So when Inez offers him $20,000 to run for city council, Tuffy gamely embarks on one of the most outlandish campaigns in political history, one that topples both his vision of the world and his place in it.

Beatty's fierce gifts have never been more apparent: Tuff marks the return of one of this generation's freshest voices.

Related Links

Kevin Powell
... authors like Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Danyel Smith, and Paul Beatty, as well
as emerging voices from around the world. In addition to showing today's ... www.aalbc.com/authors/kevin.htm

Holy Cross University
http://www.holycross.edu/departments/publicaffairs/website/features/nf010221.htm