![]() “Each blow plastering that beaten boxer smile on your face, that ear-to-ear grin you flash to the crowd to convince them that if you’re laughing, then you ain’t hurt.” ![]() “I hope ‘Hokum’ beats you down like an outclassed club fighter,” he wrote. Beatty ended his introduction by making a kind of promise, one his anthology kept. “It was as if the black writers I’d read,” he declared, “didn’t have any friends.” Beatty speaks about reading the canonical black writers as a young man and “welcoming the rhetoric but over time missing the black bon mot, the snap, the bag, the whimsy upon which” - I am working around a perfectly detonated vulgarity here - both righteous anger and freedom take flight. It’s called “Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor” (2006). ![]() ![]() But the book of his that I return to most is one he edited. Paul Beatty is the author of four novels and two books of poetry, all of them worthwhile. ![]()
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