Excerpt from Slumberland by Paul Beatty, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Ironically, though the sound of American rhetoric is one of the reasons I left, it’s the last remaining tie I have to the country of my birth. The only person back home I correspond with is Cutter Pinchbeck III, senior editor for the Kensington- Merriwether Dictionary of Standard American English. Our relationship is contentious, and like some exiled word revolutionary I try to improve the linguistic repression from afar. To date I’ve submitted four words for inclusion in the next edition: etymolophile, Corfunian, hiphopera, and phonographic memory. I like my words; they’re self-explanatory and, to my mind, much needed.Who’d believe that English is the only Indo-European language without an adjective to describe the inhabitants of the island of Corfu? Cutter Pinchbeck says we don’t need Corfunian. In his priggish rejection letters he states that the people of Corfu are called Greeks, and that an etymolophile wouldn’t be a lover of words, but a lover of the origin of words. He patronizingly says that hiphopera almost merited a lemma as an innovative, confluent melding of high and low culture; however, it didn’t possess the “straight gully, niggerish perspicuity of this year’s new entries, e.g., badonkadonk, bling, bootylicious, dead presidents, hoodrat, peeps, and swol,” just to name a few slang ephemerals. And despite my having enclosed signed affidavits from my mother and a video of me, age twelve, winning twentyfive thousand dollars on Name That Tune, Cutter Pinchbeck doesn’t believe that I, nor anyone of the hundred billion people who’ve trodden on earth in the past fifty thousand years, has ever had a phonographic memory—but I do. I remember everything I’ve ever heard. Every dropped nickel, raindrop drip-drop, sneaker squeak, and sheep bleat. Every jump rope chant, Miss Mary Mack Mack hand clap, and “eenie meanie chili beanie oop bop-bop bellini” method for choosing who’s it. I remember every sappy R&B radio lyric and distorted Hendrix riff. Every Itzhak Perlman pluck and squishy backseat contorted make-out session. I can still hear every Hey you, You the man, and John Philip Sousa euphonium toot and every tree rustle and street- corner hustle. I remember every sound I’ve ever heard. It’s like my entire life is a song I can’t get out of my head.

“Ow.” The Nigerian has burned himself. He’s shaking his hand wildly and sucking air through his teeth. His date laughs, seizes his hand, and licks and nuzzles his seared fingers. The jukebox ballad ends with a note that Ellington lays down with the gentleness of a child setting a wounded bird into a shoebox lined with tissue paper. A series of English words for “the day before yesterday” dies in the back of my throat— penultidiem . . . prepretoday . . . yonyesterday . . . —and like an unwitting Tourette’s Syndrome utterance, a word for “the day before yesterday” flies from my mouth. “Retrothence!” The blonde and the Nigerian give me a strange look. I’m going to send that to Cutter Pinchbeck III at Kensington-Merriwether. Retrothence will look awfully nice on page 1147 of the Fourth College Edition, nestled between retrospective and retroussé.

“You still have some songs left.”

The Nigerian is standing next to the jukebox.

“Put in 1007. You can play anything you want after that.”

Rock ’n’ roll saunters into the room. Overdubbed guitar riffs that don’t come off as gimmicky, drums driving the song with the tough staccato love of a caring drill sergeant, and the bass, the bass is above the fray, suspended above the strings, synthesizers and percussion, brimming with a cocksure confidence, always threatening to show off but never doing it.

Excerpted from Slumberland by Paul Beatty Copyright © 2006 by Paul Beatty. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.