24 October 2016
When Paul Beatty's The Sellout was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily New York Times and one in the weekly New York Times Book Review, too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book. The New Yorker, for example, did not put James Wood, nor any of its other book critics, on the case. Instead, The Sellout was assigned for a Briefly Noted review and thus expected to be forgotten as yet another very good literary novel that was, regrettably, not very widely read.
