Percival Everett is a prolific and innovative American storyteller whose expansive body of work traverses a diverse range of genres and themes. He often crafts narratives that are thrillingly adventurous, thought-provoking, and experimentally daring. Everett's distinctive voice, marked by bold experimentation and sharp wit, has earned him acclaim as one of the most significant literary forces in contemporary American fiction.
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 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 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.
Percival Everett's deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a gorgeous novel.
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 brilliantly postmodern set of short stories from one of America's most inventive living writers.
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?
The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before. The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that similar murders are taking place all over the country. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can't look away.
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.
