The White Boy Shuffle: A Novel

Poet Paul Beatty’s (Big Bank Take Little Bank) first novel is a colorful situation comedy about an unusual African-American's search for his identity. Set within a dramatically caricatured ethnic and cultural landscape, Gunnar Kaufman is a street poet and basketball prodigy raised in predominantly white Santa Monica, whose father is a member of the LAPD. The Kaufmans come from a hilarious family line of groveling Uncle Toms, and as Gunnar faces varying degrees of racism, he struggles between falling into step with the family tradition or forging his own way.