Black Buck

by Mateo Askaripour

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A razor-sharp and highly intelligent debut, Black Buck brings the idea of the American Dream into a new century. It is a darkly comic novel about a young Black man named Darren, who moves from trying workplace drama to a rollercoaster journey of self-actualization. A novel bred to make you think.

A New York Times Bestseller 
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

“Askaripour closes the deal on the first page of this mesmerizing novel, executing a high wire act full of verve and dark, comic energy.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys

“A hilarious, gleaming satire as radiant as its author. Askaripour has announced himself as a major talent of the school of Ralph Ellison, Paul Beatty, Fran Ross, and Ishmael Reed. Full of quick pacing, frenetic energy, absurd—yet spot on—twists and turns, and some of the funniest similes I’ve ever read, this novel is both balm and bomb.”
—Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People

For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street—a crackling, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.

There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358380887
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	73,155
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

MATEO ASKARIPOUR’s work aims to empower people of color to seize opportunities for advancement, no matter the obstacle. He was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly’s “10 rising stars to make waves in 2021,” a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. His debut novel BLACK BUCK was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Read With Jenna Today Show book club pick. He lives in Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter at @AskMateo.
 

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/05/2020

Askaripour eviscerates corporate culture in his funny, touching debut. Darren, a young Black man, lives with his mom in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood and manages a midtown Manhattan Starbucks. He’s content with his life and girlfriend, Soraya, but people tell him he could do more—he was valedictorian at Bronx Science, after all. Opportunity knocks when Darren persuades Rhett Daniels, the CEO of tech startup Sumwun and a Starbucks regular, to change his usual order. Rhett is impressed (his response: “Did you just try to reverse close me?”) and invites Darren to an interview, which leads to a sales job before he understands what the company actually does (it’s a platform for virtual therapy sessions). Darren makes good money, but struggles to keep up his commitments to his family and Soraya as Rhett pulls him into heavy after-hours partying. When an employee in China is charged with murder, Sumwun crashes, and so does Darren’s life. In an author’s note, Askaripour suggests the book is meant to serve as a manual for aspiring Black salesmen, and the device is thrillingly sustained throughout, with lacerating asides to the reader on matters of race. (“The key to any white person’s heart is the ability to shuck, jive, or freestyle. But use it wisely and sparingly.”) Darren, meanwhile, is alternately said by various white characters to resemble Malcolm X, Sidney Poitier, MLK, and Dave Chappelle, while he struggles to hold onto a sense of self, which the author conveys with a potent blend of heart and dramatic irony. Askaripour is always closing in this winning and layered bildungsroman. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Mateo Askaripour begins his debut, which follows Brooklyn-dwelling Darren as he’s plucked from his Starbucks manager job by a start-up CEO and crashed into a sales job as the only Black member of the company, with an author’s note that the book might be used as a reference by aspiring Black salesmen. It’s a satirical construct that informs this razor-sharp send-up of ladder-climbing office culture, and all the systemic and individual racism it perpetuates.

Vanity Fair

An Instant New York Times Bestseller A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick Long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize Long-listed for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize An Indie Next Pick Apple’s Best of January Amazon’s Spotlight Best Pick of the Month One of Barnes & Noble Reads “Most Anticipated for January” One of Entertainment Weekly’s “Best Books to Keep You Warm this January” One of Washington Post’s “10 Books to Read in January” One of NBC News' "10 of the Best Fiction Books by Black Authors in 2021" One of Fortune’s “Best Books for January” One of Shondaland's "Best Five Books for January" One of Essence's "21 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021" One of WIRED's "Picks for the 10 Books You Have to Read This Winter" One of O, the Oprah Magazine's "33 of the Best Beach Reads to Help You Escape" One of Vulture's "46 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021" One of Elle's "55 Best Books to Read in 2021" One of Marie Claire’s “29 Best New 2021 Books” One of Vanity Fair’s “Books to Get You Through Winter” One of E! Online's "17 Books to Add to Your Reading List in January" One of The Root's "PageTurners: We're in for a Hell of  Year" One of AV Club's "5 New Books to Read in January" One of Marie Claire's "35 Must-Read 2021 Book Releases by Black Authors" One of Cosmopolitan’s “Best New Books 2021” One of the New York Post's "Best New Books to Read" One of PopSugar’s “Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2021” One of Literary Hub's "Most Anticipated Books of the Year" One of Parade's "Best New Books to Read this Winter" One of Thrillist's "30 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021" One of Reader's Digest's "25 Best Books by Black Authors You'll Want to Know About" One of PopSugar's "Best Books of January" One of Book Riot's "10 Propulsive 2021 Books Everyone Will Be Talking About" One of Poets & Writer’s “New and Noteworthy” One of SheReads’ “The Best 12 Books of Winter” One of Alma’s “Favorite Books for Winter 2021” One of Book Riot’s “January Book Recommendations” One of Black Business Guide's "21 Books by Black Writers to Read in 2021" One of Debutiful’s “10 Debut Books You Should Read this January” One of Write or Die Tribe's "21 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021" One of Sunday Evening Post's "10 Books to Start 2021" One of The Nerd Daily's "Anticipated Debut Novels You Should Have on Your Radar in 2021" One of Grit Daily's "Best Books of 2021" One of Entertainment Weekly's "14 Books to Read During Black History Month" Included on The Rumpus' "What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Black History" A Skimm Reads Pick "An irresis

From the Publisher

"A must-read . . . Buck’s journey is one you should invest in for 2021 without question." 

"Is Mateo Askaripour's Debut Novel the Blackest B BET

This winning novel — or is it a self-help book? — opens with a striking proposition: ‘MLK, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frederick Douglass were all salesmen’ . . . Teetering between biting satire and complete earnestness (interspersed throughout are callouts with real sales advice), Askaripour’s novel charts the unlikely metamorphosis of Darren Vender . . . [whose] quick wit provides cathartic delight.” 

New York Times Book Review

Darkly comic . . . The message at the heart of this novel [is] very American, that the power is in the pitch . . . Black Buck is not unlike The Great Gatsby, in its own way.

Weekend Edition NPR

"A must-read . . . Buck’s journey is one you should invest in for 2021 without question." 

11/01/2020

DEBUT In Greek mythology, the overconfident Icarus sails gloriously through the heavens on magnificent wings of wax, rising too close to the sun and becoming painfully reacquainted with Earth. Darren Vender requires no wings of wax or even hubris to accomplish his great fall, which is the essential problem with this ambitious debut novel, drawn partly from the author's life. The story begins with a promising premise: Darren is a highly intelligent but underachieving Black barista at Starbucks. He is satisfied with his life but is constantly urged by his mother to make something of himself. And here is where the narrative begins to wobble off the rails. The story goes through several sudden and implausible changes of direction. Darren is transformed without warning into a super-salesman, soon working to help other Black salespeople, and other characters change without explanation or credible transition, from innocent bystanders to hunter-predator types. A novel that begins to carry forward the spirit of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities fizzles with a painfully contrived ending that reminds one of the unbelievably tortured (but hilarious) ending of Tootsie—but without the hilarity. VERDICT Worthy evidence of potential yet to be fulfilled, and we look forward to the time that potential is realized.—Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

Library Journal

2020-10-27
A first novel satirically lays out the wretched excesses of turn-of-the-21st-century capitalism as it both enriches and disfigures a bright young Black man’s coming-of-age.

Darren Vender is a 22-year-old product of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood who graduated first in his class at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science but passed on college and is quite happy with his life as a barista at a ground-floor Starbucks on Park Avenue. His life changes on the morning he decides to flash some impromptu genius to a charismatic suit named Rhett Daniels by convincing him to buy a different drink from the one he ordered. “Did you just try to reverse close me?” a flabbergasted Daniels asks before offering Darren a job with a startup sales company called Sumwun located several stories above the coffee shop. Reluctantly, Darren agrees and soon finds himself sharing a lofty, turbulent office suite with several tightly wound Type A White strivers obsessed with closing deals, pleasing Rhett, and rising higher within the company. Because Darren is the first and only African American employee, he has to endure being told by Rhett and other Whites how much he resembles Martin Luther King Jr., Morgan Freeman, Dave Chappelle, and other Black notables who resemble each other hardly at all. He emerges from rigorous, emotionally bruising indoctrination to become a high-octane fast-tracker among Sumwun’s army of sales tyros—and that’s when the money and fame start flowing into Darren’s life along with several layers of trouble, much of it coming when Darren struggles to accommodate his newfound prosperity to the life, along with the family and friends, he’s left behind in Brooklyn. As Darren himself puts it at one point, “The turns in this story are half-absurd, half jaw-dropping, and a whole heaping of crazy.” And, one might add, borderline corny and secondhand in narrative tactics, too. Still, even with its drolly deployed nuggets of sales tips directed at the reader throughout the narrative, the book's biggest selling point is the writing: witty, jazzily discursive, and rhythmically propulsive.

This whole novel comes across like a brash, in-your-face sales pitch leavened with punchy, go-for-broke mother-wit.

Kirkus Reviews

Askaripour wields a sharp satirical blade to deliver social commentary . . . He may have written the first satire that doubles as self-help.

|Los Angeles Times

"Mateo Askaripour’s voice is so fresh. The writing is so intimate. At moments, it's satirical and funny and then at moments, it's heartbreaking . . . The details are so intimate, spot on and beautiful. I found myself underlining constantly." 

Jenna Bush Hager

"An irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America . . . [Black Buck] is alternately sly and sweet, a work of cultural criticism that laments and celebrates the power of money."

Ron Charles

"A biting and brilliant novel, Black Buck is masterclass in self-reflection and meaningful satire."

"The Best Five Books for January" Shondaland

Askaripour wields a sharp satirical blade to deliver social commentary . . . He may have written the first satire that doubles as self-help.

Los Angeles Times