Percival Everett Books

A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of viewWhen Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.

A detached Vietnam veteran's wanderings in the West in search of a homecoming

Percival Everett's deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a gorgeous novel.

The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

Training horses is dangerous - a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle takes courage. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with a touching originality, Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores a divided America.

Hailed by the New York Times as "both a treatise and a romp," a bold and brilliant novel of a man coming to terms with himself. Now in paperback, this provocative tale within a tale details the life of avant-garde novelist and college professor Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. Monk, frustrated with his dismal book sales, composes a fierce parody of exploitative ghetto literature entitled My Pafology, which is greeted by critics as the work of a great new voice and garners him the success that he covets. Monk's impending struggle with his moral principles emerges as a revolutionary and riotous indictment of race and publishing in America.

A brilliantly postmodern set of short stories from one of America's most inventive living writers.

Sunday Times Fiction Book of the Year 2022 Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2022 Sunday Times Novel of the Year 2022 When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America's violent past. 'Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.' The New York Times

A classic of politics, murder, and espionage "Watershed has all the makings of a social thriller...In this novel about water and the struggle for a life free of injustice, the mix doesn't just work, it flows." — Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio "It’s hard . . . to imagine a novelist today with fresher eyes than Percival Everett."―Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Everett mines history for this one, focusing on the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Watershed is an excellent example of Percival Everett’s famed bitingly political narrative style.

A brilliant satire of mistaken identity, race and class in America.

An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from “one of our culture’s preeminent novelists” (Los Angeles Times) Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

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?Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.Published for the first time in the UK, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is like nothing you've read before, or will ever read again.

Percival Everett explores themes of absence and longing in his captivating poetry collection, Sonnets for a Missing Key. Known for his acclaimed novels, Everett's return to poetry offers a fresh perspective, weaving intricate sonnets that delve into personal and universal experiences. This collection showcases his unique voice and literary prowess, inviting readers to reflect on the complexities of life and the search for meaning.

A professor of mathematics who claims to be an expert at nothing partners with an aspiring villain who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal a shoebox containing nothing, with the help of a brainwashed astrophysicist

A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of The Trees and James.

»Das ist ein großer Literaturspaß!« Denis Scheck USA, Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts: Im Städtchen Money in den Südstaaten werden mehrere Männer ermordet: meist dick, doof und weiß. Neben jeder Leiche taucht ein Körper auf, der die Züge von Emmett Till trägt, eines 1955 gelynchten Schwarzen Jungen. Zwei afroamerikanische Detektive ermitteln, doch der Sheriff sowie eine Gruppe hartnäckiger Rednecks leisten erbitterten Widerstand. Als sich die Morde auf ganz Amerika ausweiten, suchen die Detektive des Rätsels Lösung in den Archiven von Mama Z, die seit Jahrzehnten über die Opfer der Lynchjustiz in Money Buch führt. Eine atemberaubende Mischung aus Parodie und Hardboiled-Thriller, wie es sie bislang in der amerikanischen Literatur nicht gegeben hat.

Nach dem Welterfolg von »James« ein neuer Roman von Percival Everett – ein brillantes Kabinettstück mit Schurken à la James Bond: Dr. No ist ein renommierter Professor für Mathematik an der Brown University, Experte für das Nichts. Das macht ihn zum perfekten Berater für den Schwarzen Milliardär John Sill. Dieser will einen in Fort Knox bewahrten Schuhkarton knacken, in dem sich angeblich »nichts« befindet. Denn wer das Nichts kontrolliert, soll die Weltherrschaft an sich reißen können – und Sill sinnt wegen der jahrhundertelangen Ungerechtigkeit der Weißen auf Rache. Percival Everett hat einen hinreißenden Spionageroman und einen satirischen Seitenhieb auf Ethnie und Macht in den USA geschrieben.