Percival L. Everett

For Her Dark Skin

Dr. No

The narrator, an African-American hydrologist working for the Utah Department of Agriculture and the Fish and Game Commission, encounters difficulties when he tries to collect the signature of a bigoted old woman named Emma Bickers, who lives in the mountain town of Dotson.

Alluvial Deposits

Among the gods, Dionysos is the wildest and darkest, the most given to excess, eroticism, and frenzy. In this wickedly funny novel, Percival Everett revisits the age-old myth, and takes a closer look at this eccentric half-man, half-god. Frenzy tells the story of Dionysos through his "mortal bookmark," an assistant called Vlepo. It is Vlepo's job to witness and experience on behalf of his curious master. Together they collapse the boundaries of space and time, piecing together a fantastic narrative out of familiar legend. Yet Dionysos in his "god-haze" can never be satisfied. Ironically, this most erotic of gods is prevented by his very divinity from experiencing full sensation - while the faithful Vlepo is sent on ever more bizarre quests for satiation. By exploring the nature of immortality and divinity, Frenzy exposes some of the overlooked truths of our own, all too temporal life.

Frenzy

In Slut's Hole, Wyoming, recently returned Vietnam veteran David Larson forms a posse to find Butch, a seven-year-old Vietnamese war orphan, and the severely retarded son of Sixbury, a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher

Walk Me to the Distance

Joseph Weixlmann

For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's--and arguably the world's--premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded--the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize. Interviews collected in this volume--several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time--display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work's being described as "characteristically uncharacteristic." At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about "Jim Crow," a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.

Conversations with Percival Everett

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.

Poems

Re: F (gesture)

Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a terrible slump. He’s batting below .200 at the plate, and even worse in bed with his wife; and he secretly fears he’s inherited his mother’s insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his record of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology,” his record player, and his new saxophone and flees, negotiating his way through madcap adventures and flashbacks to childhood (“If you folks believed more strongly in God, maybe you wouldn’t be colored”). Pursued by a raging dope dealer, saddled with a mishandled elephant and an abused little white girl, he manages in the end to fly free, both transcending and inspired by the pull of so much life.

A Novel

Suder

If you said 'cubism' fifteen times, you would be getting close to some of what Percival Everett, a famous novelist and gifted painter himself, is playing with in this new book of poems. In words that mimic process, the poems here attempt to reverse the canvas, taking perspective and skewing it to reflect the world around it, spiraling into the work as a way to get out of it. Often what stands in the way of art is art itself, a lingering delusion that there is such a thing as beauty, especially universal beauty.

Abstraktion und Einfühlung

Tanner, call him Rhino Tanner, his friends do because theyre afraid of him. Hes a self made man who makes his living killing large game in Africa -- a dysfunctional Horatio Alger who sets his sights and sites on the worlds greatest natural wonder The Grand Canyon. But in doing so, Tanner unleashes forces that he cannot comprehend and cannot control his idealistic son Niko, Native American holy men, Zen adepts and, yes, Mother Nature.

A Novella

Grand Canyon, Inc

Three cowhands chase and corral ones in this zany book about the Wild West.

The One that Got Away

Theodore Street is driving toward the ocean, where he plans to walk into the waves and drown himself, but on his way there is killed in a head-on collision. Three days later, at his funeral, he sits up in his coffin, apparently resurrected. The mourners are horrified, and the story makes headlines around the world.

Percival L. Everett

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