Paul Beatty - A Dança do Rapaz Branco

If a Hollywood mogul buys the film rights to my life, the TV Guide synopsis will say: In the fight for freedom, a reluctant young poet convinces Black Americans to give up hope and kill themselves in a tragic, explosive finale. Full of laughs and passion. Some violence and language not suitable for children."

Gunnar Kaufman, descended from a long line of men he detests — from slaves to cowards who helped assassinate Malcolm X — spent his childhood sheltered in the white tranquility of Santa Monica, far from trouble. However, after he and his sisters refuse to go to a summer camp for Black children “because they're different from us,” their mother immediately moves the family to South Central Los Angeles, so her children can be in touch with the culture they are beginning to deny. And so it is that Gunnar — future poet, terrible dancer, reluctant ladies’ man, and phenomenal basketball player — finds himself learning to be who he is amid the gangs, riots, stereotypes, violence, and beauty of the streets and of Black life in 1990s America.

Paul Beatty’s debut novel, A Dança do Rapaz Branco, is a kaleidoscopic literary comedy about an unusual African American searching for his identity in a caricatured — and yet strangely familiar — America.