Best Selling Books by Percival Everett

"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 Murphy''s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust? 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.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim''s point of view NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW''S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more. "Genius"—The Atlantic • "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."—Chicago Tribune • "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."—The Boston Globe • "Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."—The New York Times When 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 the electrifying 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.

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 succumbing to Alzheimer''s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father''s suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins''s bestseller. He doesn''t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

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.

A rediscovered classic of politics, murder, espionage, for the first time in paperback 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. Introduced by Sherman Alexie, who has taken a film option on the novel, this important novel is published in paperback for the first time.

An artist ponders a painting he wants to keep private along with the back stories that inspired it, the secrets that continue to haunt him. He will not show his wife, children, or his best friend his work in progress, made up all of shades of blue.

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, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car 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. Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

Now with a brilliant new package, a re-issue of the sophomore novel by Percival Everett, New York Times bestselling author of National Book Award winner James. Haunting, provocative and bleakly funny, Walk Me to the Distance is Percival Everett’s brilliant reexamination of the Western, and a laconic tragicomedy about what it takes to survive in the last days of a bygone big-sky country. In self-imposed exile after returning home from the war in Vietnam, David Larson meanders into the barren town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, where a local widow takes him under her wing. After making a sort of home among the town’s hardscrabble locals, David grudgingly adopts a young Vietnamese girl abandoned along the highway. This sets in motion a set of tragic turns as Western mythos and frontier justice clash against the tides of a changing world. First published in 1985 by Clarion Books, Walk Me to the Distance was the sophomore novel of an iconic American voice. Over the course of his five decade career, Everett has written over twenty five books and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize (for 2020’s Telephone), twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the recipient of the 2024 National Book Award for the “genius” (The Atlantic) James, a brilliantly imagined retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. James was a #1 New York Times bestseller and is being developed into film by Stephen Spielberg.

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, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke," along with a generous helping of philosophy, semiotics, and trashy thrillers. He''s also fond of writing poems and stories (in crayon). But Ralph has limits. He''s mute by choice and can''t drive, so in his own estimation he''s not a genius. Unfortunately for him, everyone else disagrees. His psychiatrist kidnaps him for testing, and once his brilliance is quantified (IQ: 475), a Pentagon officer also abducts him. Diabolically funny and lacerating in its critique of poststructuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes. If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it''s Ralph, one of Percival Everett''s most enduring creations.

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 of insanity or liberation. The catalysts in Everett''s tales are surprising: a stuffed boar''s head, mounted on the wall of a diner, becomes an object of intense, inexplicable desire; a painter is driven to the point of suicide by a mute who returns day after day to mow the artist''s lawn; the loss of a pair of dentures sparks a turn toward revelation. The characters respond to their dilemmas in ways that are both unpredictable and memorable. Everett''s highly original voice propels the reader into unfamiliar, yet unforgettable terrain: a landscape full of excitement, astonishment, and self-discovery.

The novel follows the life of a young man named Not Sidney Poitier, after he was orphaned at age eleven and inherited a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

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.

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 is a confession of a victim turned villain. When Ishmael Kidder''s eleven-year-old daughter is brutally murdered, it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. The punishment is carried out without guilt, and with the usual equipment—duct tape, rope, and superglue. But the tools of psychological torture prove to be the most devastating of all. Percival Everett''s most lacerating indictment to date, The Water Cure follows the gruesome reasoning and execution of revenge in a society that has lost a common moral ground, where rules are meaningless. A master storyteller, Everett draws upon disparate elements of Western philosophy, language theory, and military intelligence reports to create a terrifying story of loss, anger, and helplessness in our modern world. This is a timely and important novel that confronts the dark legacy of the Bush years and the state of America today.

Now with a brilliant new package, a re-issue of the debut novel by Percival Everett, New York Times bestselling author of National Book Award winner James. It''s the middle of the season and the third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, Craig Suder, is in the midst of an inescapable slump. On top of that, his wife has been keeping her distance and Suder can’t shake the creeping fear that he might have inherited his mother’s insanity. That’s’ when his team suggests he might enjoy a little break. What’s a man to do pack up the essentials—his record player, Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” and a saxophone—and hit the road? What ensues is the adventure of a lifetime. Haunted by his past as a young black boy in the South, and soon on the run from some less-than-savory individuals, Suder soon finds himself in curious company—including a little white girl and a pet elephant. Epic, thrilling, and utterly alive, Suder takes us on a whirlwind journey through the joys, the sorrows, and the madness that make up a life. First published in 1983 by Louisianna State University Press, Suder marked the debut of an iconic American voice. Over the course of his five decade career, Everett has written over twenty five books and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize (for 2020’s Telephone), twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the recipient of the 2024 National Book Award for the “genius” (The Atlantic) James, a brilliantly imagined retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. James was a #1 New York Times bestseller and is being developed into film by Stephen Spielberg.

A collection of short stories centered around the West includes tales of a deaf Native American girl wandering in the desert and a young boy coping with the death of his sister by angling for trout in the creek where she drowned.

Slave masters were people, too. From recent texts and films we have learned that slavery was a bad thing. Colonel Hap Thompson was simply a man about his business. His business was training other people.

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION Praise for Percival Everett: "Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . ." --Terry D''Auray ". . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human" --Sven Birkets, The New York Times "The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant." --The Boston Globe ". . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire." --Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael