Percival Everett: 20 books

Praise for Percival Everett: “If Percival Everett isn’t already a household name, it’s because people are more interested in politics than truth.”-Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Washington Square Ensemble “Everett’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance...

"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...

Acclaimed author Percival Everett will take an atheist’s-eye-view of the little-known “Jefferson Bible,” the third president’s response to the King James Bible. Percival Everett’s novel Erasure won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and his most recent, A History of the African-American...

Damned If I Do is an exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid. A cop,...

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was...

Winner of the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature The characters in Big Picture, Percival Everett's darkly comic collection of stories, are often driven to explosive, life-changing action. Everett delves into those moments when outside forces bring us to the brink...

I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I executed these actions with not only deliberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose . . . The true answer to your question is shorter than the lie. Did you? I did. This...

A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR) Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A...

Suder, Percival Everett’s acclaimed first novel, follows the exploits and ordeals of Craig Suder, a struggling black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners. In the midst of a humiliating career slump and difficulties with his demanding wife and troubled son, Suder packs up his saxophone, phonograph,...

Percival Everett's Erasure is a blistering satire about race and writing 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."...

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...

In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel The New York Times praised as "both a treatise and a romp" Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don't include staring at a mobile. Aided by his mother, he reads voraciously: "All of Swift,...

A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss,...

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...