The White Boy Shuffle - Couverture souple

"Paul Beatty's hip-hop epic never misses a beat in telling how a nerdy black kid from a white-bread neighbourhood becomes an infamous inner-city poet laureate, via an obligatory stint as a local basketball hero and some daredevilling as a member of the Gun Totin' Hooligans. Simultaneously hilarious and immensely moving, Beatty's Pynchonesque non sequiturs cascade with the seeming ease of an Armstrong trill" (New Yorker)

"A blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life... aimed almost as much at black self-delusion and revolutionary pretension as at the surrounding racism of white society... a rich, raucous, hilarious, overdone porridge full of the various ingredients of the daily absurdist American spectacle" (New York Times)

"A thousand-miles-an-hour hoot" (Esquire)

"A dazzling satire of the African-American urban experience" (Patrick Neate Guardian)

Born into a long line of uncle Toms - including an ancestor who escaped into slavery and a relative who set up Malcolm X - Gunnar Kaufman grew up doing the perfect white boy shuffle in Santa Monica. Now the street-stupid kid has to learn - and fast - how to survive the hard-line homeboys of inner-city LA, in one of the funniest, funkiest books for years.