Weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston Tuffy Foshay, is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of millions from his idea Cap'n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and his wife, Yolanda, he married from jail over the phone. Shrewdly comical as this dazzling novel is, it turns acerbically sublime when the frustrated Tuffy agrees to run for City Council. Smartly irreverent and edgily fierce, Tuff is a bona fide original.

A zany, riotous concoction of nonstop hip-hop chatter and brilliant mainstream social satire, Beatty again demonstrates why he is hailed as ‘one of the shrewdest cultural commentators and hilarious cutups of his generation’.