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Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast su...
'[Percival Everett's] books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking . . . sad, affecting and marvelous' New York Times A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Telephone is an astonishing story of love, loss and grief from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (now an Oscar-nominated film). Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in an incredibly niche field, he spends his days playing chess with his daughter, trading puns with his wife as she does yoga, and dodging committee work at the college where he teaches. After his daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness, Wells finds a cryptic plea for help tucked into a secondhand jacket bought online. Desperately seeking a way avoid his newfound sense of powerlessness, he embarks for New Mexico on a quixotic rescue mission. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Time Out Chicago, Top 10 Book of 2005 Winner of the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction Training horses is dangerous—a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more important, patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of intolerance. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Wounded by Percival Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a comic tour de force from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (adapted into an Oscar-nominated film). The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation. Percival Everett’s novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn’t know what to do with him. This novel ranks as one of the greatest achievements of Percival Everett, an overlooked master of American storytelling.
A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why h...
"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." —Wall Street Journal * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction * A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in ...
Big-game hunter Rhino Tanner seeks to develop the Grand Canyon into an amusement park but unleashes forces that he cannot comprehend or control.
Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated film. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem. Everett skewers race, class, identity, surrealism and much more in this masterful short story collection from one of America's most inventive living writers. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
With this wildly inventive and funny novel, Percival Everett has created his unlikeliest hero to date. Mute by choice but able to read complex philosophical treatises and ponder the worth (not much) of Derrida and Barthes, baby Ralph is considered mentally 'challenged' by his father. On discovery of his unusual talents, however, there is soon a whole host of people eager for a stake in this child prodigy. Among the most fiendish are Dr Steimell, the psychiatrist; Dr Davis and her illegal chimps; and Nana, the secret agent. All have plans for baby Ralph who misses his mother terribly and doesn't warm to his role as 'Defence Stealth Operative 1369'. As the pursuit of Ralph across America gathers pace we are treated to intellectual conundrums and words of wisdom that perhaps only a baby could dream up.
WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proc...