How long is it?
304 pages in the Picador 2021 trade paperback edition.
Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 67 / 100High
- Length
- 304 pagesPicador · 2021
- Reading time
- 6 hat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Brisk
- Emotional intensity
- 4 / 5
About 6 h · at 30 minutes a day, about 13 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Bonbon grows fruit and marijuana in Dickens, a fictional Black farming community outside Los Angeles, where his sociologist father raised him through experiments about race and obedience. After police kill his father and Dickens disappears from official maps, he sets out to restore the town's recognition. Hominy Jenkins, an elderly former Little Rascals actor, insists on becoming his slave, and Bonbon attempts to segregate a local school—actions that bring him before the Supreme Court, where the novel opens.
Reader notes
Abrasive and digressive, the first-person narration races through jokes and arguments about American racism. The satire is verbally dense and frequently uses racial slurs; childhood abuse and police violence remain serious subjects even when described in the same caustic register.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Dense · Essayistic · Experimental · Witty
- Tone
- Absurdist · Dark · Irreverent · Satirical
- Structure
- Framed · Nonlinear
- Driven by
- Character · Ideas · Voice
- Point of view
- First person
- Setting
- Los Angeles area, California
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 4 / 5
- Ideas
- 5 / 5
- Structure
- 4 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 3 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Community
- Family
- Identity
- Inequality
- Politics and ideology
- Race and racism
Content notes
- Violence
- Strong
- Sexual content
- Strong
- Swearing
- Strong
- Substance use
- Strong
- Abuse
- Strong
- Self-harm or suicide
- Mild
Standing and awards
Highly regarded
- Booker Prize, 2016
- National Book Critics Circle Award, 2015
- Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee, 2016
- NYT 10 Best Books, 2015
- National Book Critics Circle Award — National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 2015
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
Picador · 2021 · Trade Paperback. ISBN 9781250808240.
How long does it take to read The Sellout?
About 6 hours at 50 pages an hour, based on the 304-page Picador edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty is an American writer and professor of writing at Columbia University whose fiction uses first-person voices, verbal invention, and absurdist satire to examine race, public identity, and civic belonging. After earning an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College, he published his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle, in 1996. Its poet-athlete narrator, Gunnar Kaufman, reflects Beatty’s interest in the pressure to become a public symbol. The Sellout develops that interest through an urban farmer whose attempt to restore an erased Los Angeles-area community leads him to reinstate slavery and segregation. Beatty later became the first writer from the United States to receive the Man Booker Prize. Across these novels, comic provocation exposes the distance between claims of racial progress and the realities of American life.
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Edition and details
- Publisher
- Picador
- Publication year
- 2021
- Format
- Trade Paperback
- Pages
- 304
- ISBN
- 9781250808240
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 2015
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Political Fiction · Politics & Government · Literary fiction · Contemporary literary · Experimental fiction · Social novel · Absurdism · Dark comedy · Satire
- Editions
- 10
- Languages
- 2 (English, Unspecified)