Percival Everett

"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 arrive in town, 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...

A professor of mathematics who claims to be an expert at nothing partners with an aspiring villain who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal a shoebox containing nothing, with the help of a brainwashed astrophysicist.

“. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .” ―Terry D’Auray --

"Percival Everett's The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document--a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of...

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We's Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym...

he 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 marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

Things spiral out of control when Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker, who set out to solve the murder of an elderly woman, becomes entangled in multiple investigations of bloody and mysterious crimes that may all be related.

Provides a take on old age in a story told in interwoven narratives centered around a son visiting his father in a nursing home, where he is writing a novel.

A farcical tale about Ralph, an eleven-month-old infant who reads sophisticated literature but does not consider himself a genius because he is unable to drive. Soon everyone is trying to put his genius to their own uses, and lacerating poststructuralist critiques give way to abductions and chase scenes.