Paul Beatty

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since the '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject...

Not far in the future, Francesca is an apprentice in the idyllic, agrarian community of Heron Fleet. She loves her impetuous partner Anya and the community acts as mother and father to her, as its founders intended. But outside Heron Fleet, the world is violent. Only a remnant of city populations, organised into violent despotic scavenger gangs, cling on by combing through rubble in search of food. They are the survivors of an ecological disaster.

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Traveling to recently unified Berlin in search of a little-known avant-garde jazzman whom he believes to be a musical kindred spirit, disaffected Los Angeles DJ Darky encounters the dramatic local changes that have transpired after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and ruminates on a range of cultural, social, and philosophical topics.