Author
Percival Everett
Birth Date
December 22, 1956
(69 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Percival Everett is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor known for his wide-ranging, formally inventive fiction that often satirizes race, identity, academia, and American culture. Raised in South Carolina, Everett studied philosophy at the University of Miami and earned an MFA from Brown University. He has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California for many years.
Everett has published numerous novels across genres, including Erasure (2001), a satire of publishing and racial expectations in literature, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a comic philosophical novel about identity and naming. He is also known for The Trees (2022), a darkly humorous work addressing racial violence and historical memory in the United States.
In addition to his novels, Everett has written poetry, children’s books, and short fiction, often experimenting with style and narrative form. His work is celebrated for its intelligence, irony, and refusal to conform to literary or social expectations, establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American literature.
Everett has published numerous novels across genres, including Erasure (2001), a satire of publishing and racial expectations in literature, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a comic philosophical novel about identity and naming. He is also known for The Trees (2022), a darkly humorous work addressing racial violence and historical memory in the United States.
In addition to his novels, Everett has written poetry, children’s books, and short fiction, often experimenting with style and narrative form. His work is celebrated for its intelligence, irony, and refusal to conform to literary or social expectations, establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American literature.
Books
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...
Suder 2025
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...
James 2024
In James, Percival Everett reimagines the story of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who escapes down the Mississippi River alongside Huck. Now at the center...
Dr. No 2022
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...
The Trees 2021
Percival 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...
Telephone 2020
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...
So Much Blue 2017
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 by twenty-one...
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 deaf Native American girl wanders...
Glyph 2014
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,...
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...
Assumption 2011
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...
Erasure 2011
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...
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 a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney...
Wounded 2007
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...
Damned If I Do 2004
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...
God's Country 2003
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...
Watershed 2003
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...