A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier. 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 is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing...
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...
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...
Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback. 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...
A new collection of stories set in the West from "one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers" (NPR) 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 off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of...
An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America. 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 Poitier.Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable...
Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie.” —Wall Street Journal 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...
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...
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.
Despite the wide-ranging action, these stories are unified by spare dialogue, tight plot development and a deadpan irony which is in evidence throughout.
Training horses is dangerous-a head-to-head confrontation with a 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly 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...
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