The White Boy Shuffle

Paul Beatty, on the basis of two slim collections of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, has been called "the premier bard of hip hop," "a West Coast word wizard," and"the poet laureate of Generation X." He has performed his poetry on college campuses throughout the United States and Europe; he's been lauded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and at thirty-three years old, he has been deemed heir to Allen Ginsberg's oral tradition. His cultural landscape summons up...
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Paul Beatty, on the basis of two slim collections of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, has been called "the premier bard of hip hop," "a West Coast word wizard," and"the poet laureate of Generation X." He has performed his poetry on college campuses throughout the United States and Europe; he's been lauded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and at thirty-three years old, he has been deemed heir to Allen Ginsberg's oral tradition. His cultural landscape summons up music, sound bites, cartoons, films, and video games. He uses the terms of pop culture to reveal its nonsense, and in his astonishing first novel he brings his extraordinary talent for image, cadence, and rhythm to fiction. Beatty's partly autobiographical novel is a moving, deft satire on issues of race as well as a coming-of-age of a contemporary African American, Gunnar Kaufman, who is in no way typical. Unequivocally and without apology, Gunnar states that he is not the seventh son of a seventh son of a se