A double agent and a sellout. A French Vietnamese man concealed to nearly everyone around him, and a black American who is a stranger in his own hometown. These are the narrators of The Sellout by Paul Beatty and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, two of the most searing, complex, and celebrated books in recent times. The books are also funny—not the cute kind of funny, but the kind that causes our bellies to contract when we hear the truth quickly and deftly told. In fall 2017, the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hosted Beatty and Nguyen for an onstage conversation. We asked them to talk about the resonances in their work, about their common questions and struggles.

In The Sellout, Beatty describes a comedian, a heavy guy, “unpaid-electricity-bill dark,”  who “did more than tell jokes; he plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable.” One night, a white couple comes into the club, in a black neighborhood in LA, and sits in front, until the comedian tells them: “Get the fuck out.” First they laugh, thinking it’s part of the act, then their laughter turns nervous, and then their chairs scrape backward and they get up and leave.