NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, THE SEATTLE TIMES, ELLE, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, AND OPRAH DAILY A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view • From the “literary icon” (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson’s critically acclaimed film American Fiction"If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read James, by Percival Everett" —The Washington PostWhen the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of...

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...

A veteran of the Viet Nam war returns to Georgia, drives across the country and has his car break down in Wyoming. He ends up sticking around this extremely small town with its odd population.

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 proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill's desire to become a literal Bond...

Retired Virginia obstetrician John Livesey, recently widowed and discouraged by the world's crumbling morals, meets a man who has just performed an unnecessary cesarean section on his wife so as to be the one to deliver their child. Though initially appalled by the act. Livesey finds himself recalling it later when he learns a friend is dying of cancer, when his affair with a younger woman ends in disillusionment, and when, during an extended visit to his son and his family in Oregon, he realizes his daughter-in-law's unborn baby does not belong to her husband. Coming to admire the calm directness with which the man took matters of life and death into his own hands, Livesey begins to reconsider what he values and what he will protect.

For Her Dark Skin is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes.

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of TelephonePercival Everett's The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative...

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...

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperbackThelonious "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...

A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the pastKevin 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 he had the affair, but he can't let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard's drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with...

Lewis Martin, a retired college professor, stumbles upon the body of a friend of his, Martin Aguilera, when he stops by his cabin for a quick visit. When he later returns with the sheriff, the body is no longer there and there is no real evidence that anything had taken place in the cabin.

"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." --Wall Street JournalA 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...

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, and Charlie Parker's Ornithology and begins a personal crusade for independence, freedom, and contentment. This ambitious quest takes Suder on a series of madcap adventures involving cocaine smugglers, an elephant named Renoir, and a young runaway, but the journey also forces him to reflect on bygone times. Deftly alternating between the past and the present, Everett tenderly reveals the rural South of Suder's childhood -- the withdrawn father; the unhinged, protective mother; the detached, lustful brother; and the jazz pianist who teaches Suder to take chances. And risk it all he finally does: Suder's travels culminate in the fulfillment of his most fanciful childhood dream.LSU Press

<p><b>In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i> praised as "both a treatise and a romp"</b></p><p><b></b></p><p><b></b></p><p>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, <i>Invisible Man</i>, 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...

A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney PoitierOgden 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, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.

Time Out Chicago, Top 10 Book of 2005Winner of the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award for FictionTraining 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, Percival Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.

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 that could place him alongside Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison . . .”—Publishers Weekly “I think Percival Everett is a genius. I’ve been a fan since his first novel. He continues to amaze me with each novel—as if he likes making 90-degree turns to see what’s around the corner, and then over the edge . . . He’s a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him.”—Terry McMillan, author of Mama A fictitious and satirical chronicle of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s desire to pen a history of African-Americans—his and his aides’ belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, The History follows the letters of loose cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, kindly family friends, and an aspiring author named Septic. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history. Percival Everett is the author of 15 works of fiction, among them Glyph, Watershed and Frenzy. His most recent novel, Erasure, won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and did little to earn him friends. James Kincaid is an English professor at the University of Southern California and has written seven books in literary theory and cultural studies. These books and Kincaid himself have gradually lost their moorings in the academic world, so there was nothing left for him to do but to adopt the guise of fiction writer. Writing about madness comes easy to him.