It’s a novel, but there’s a bunch of other crap in there I learned early on that you can do anything on the page. “Sometimes I romanticise – I go back even to the Harlem renaissance, when people would say, ‘This book isn’t going to sell but I believe in you.’ I think there’s still some of that in publishing. “I get hurt when I meet editors who tell me about books they really liked but couldn’t publish. Paul Beatty overcome by emotion as he wins Man Booker prize Guardian All things, no matter how piously regarded, up to and including the US civil rights movement, are there to be punctured by Beatty’s fierce and fizzing wit. Nothing is sacred in The Sellout, in which the book’s narrator (surname Me) decides to reinstate segregated schools and reluctantly takes on a slave in his home district of Dickens, Los Angeles. It is certainly a book in which one gasps frequently – amid deeply uncomfortable laughter and, at times, tears. It would be like, ‘Really? Still?’ I guess they thought the book wouldn’t sell.” He won’t be drawn, but the implication is that he suspects publishers may have found the material too harsh, too unconventional, too unfamiliar – and, conceivably, beneath all that, in some undefinable way too black. I was like, ‘Why? What’s all that about?’ I would be uncomfortable guessing. The morning after the night before, the New York-based, Los Angeles-born writer is slightly dazed, somewhat short of sleep and good-naturedly overcoming his reluctance to talk about his work. “It’s weird for me,” says Beatty, who is 54.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty