Genius--The Atlantic - A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.--Chicago Tribune - A provocative, enlightening literary work of art.--The Boston Globe - Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.--The New York Times

When 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 American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

When 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 American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a cult literary icon (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross

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 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 becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone

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, 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 book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can't look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America's pulse.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is 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 young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: What's your name? a kid would ask. Not Sidney, I would say. Okay, then what is it?

WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

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 villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back.

Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn't to say that it's not about anything. In fact, it's about villains. Bond villains. And that's not nothing.

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION

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 for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

This 'comic and fierce' novel spoofs the classic Western format with the dark, incisive humor we've come to expect from the acclaimed, National Book Award-winning author of James

One of the earliest works anchoring Percival Everett's illustrious career, God's Country is by turns funny, shocking, and devastating. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. Unfortunately, he's a coward. When he sees a band of Injun impersonators pillaging his home, he has half a mind to ride down that hill and say somethin', but it was just half a mind after all. 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 enlists the help of the best tracker in the West: a Black man named Bubba.

With an introduction from renowned novelist Madison Smartt Bell, this is the perfect edition to add to your growing Percival Everett collection. As NPR's Michael Schaub noted, It's impossible to predict what the next Everett book will bring, but it's always a safe bet that it's going to be great.

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES - AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION - Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time.--Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry - VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing.--Library Journal - Your favorite writer's writer.--Entertainment Weekly - Percival Everett is poised for a big year.--The Wall Street Journal - Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets.--Pasadena Star-News - Wry and epigrammatic.--Publisher's Weekly - A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry.--Amsterdam News

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett's sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past

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 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 the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he's kept from his wife.

So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

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 Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Everett mines history for this one, focusing on the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

Watershed is an excellent example of Percival Everett's famed bitingly political narrative style.

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 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.

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.

In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel The New York Times praised as both a treatise and a romp

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, 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 its critique of poststructuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes. If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it's Ralph, one of Percival Everett's most enduring creations.

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 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 stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem.

Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

[A]n outrageously funny satire of race relations and racism, US history, contemporary sexual mores and behavior, academia, and the publishing industry . . . It could become a cult-classic . . . Highly recommended. --Library Journal

Everett and Kincaid present a fictitious 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, A 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.

Time Out Chicago, Top 10 Book of 2005
Winner of the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction

New paperback edition available!

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 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, Wounded by Percival Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.

Praise for Percival Everett:

. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .

--Terry D'Auray

. . . 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

. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .

--The Boston Globe

. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.

--Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael