Novelist and poet Paul Beatty's new book, The Sellout, was described by the New York Times as "This year's most cheerfully outrageous satire... Sharp-minded and fabulously profane." A Los Angeles native, Beatty has been honing his comedy skills for a long time — 20 years ago, his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle, won raves for its satire and became a cult classic. Ten years ago, he edited Hokum, an anthology of African-American humour that spans more than 150 years. The Sellout is his fourth novel.

Paul Beatty spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from New York City, where he has lived for more than 25 years.

On Oct. 25, 2016, Paul Beatty won the 2016 Man Booker Prize. He was the first American author to receive the award.

The sobriety of African-American literature goes against certain stereotypes that there may be about what black writing's supposed to be and how we want to present ourselves. I'm not denigrating it or saying that I think something sober isn't good literature. For me, it just felt like everything was on the same note. Not that I was thinking about this in 7th or 8th grade, but it was something I noticed. As I started thinking about writing, and reading more, I noticed that a lot of African-American literature that I was reading didn't feel like how I experienced black life. A lot of that was through humour, and through a certain kind of cynicism and brilliance that I just didn't see in those books.

Getting into college was a big thing for me. I was fortunate — I had some really good teachers. Two professors in particular saw something in me and really looked out for me. They convinced me to go to grad school. And then I was in a class where we got these two early assignments — one was to write about your room, and the other was to go to a block that you weren't familiar with and write about the experience. They were just two simple assignments, but in doing them I realized how much I had always loved writing, and how important it had always been to me. Then in class, the professor asked me to read my little thing that I'd written, and everyone in the class was like, "whoa." It was a kind of reaction I hadn't had in a long time, and it just sparked something in me. I told a friend that I wanted to be a writer. And when I said it, it really hit me. And then I had to go about finding out how one becomes a writer, because I had no idea.

My friends have been abused at the hands of the cops. Mostly the LAPD. And it's something that has been going on as long as I can remember. But I was doing some research at the library, going through newspapers from the thirties, and there were the same kinds of accounts in there — the cops shooting three Negro kids in the back for stealing hubcaps or whatever they were (or weren't) doing. There were just these little lines, and they were in there almost every week, and you could see how endemic this abuse was. So it wasn't about addressing all the stuff that's going on right now — the book could have come out next year or it could have come out 20 years ago and these things would seem just as prescient.