Short Story Collections
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 boar's head, mounted on the wall of a diner, becomes an object of intense, inexplicable desire; a painter is driven to the point of suicide by a mute who returns day after day to mow the artist's lawn; the loss of a pair of dentures sparks a turn toward revelation.
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.
AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES AUTHOR OF ERASURE , now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION 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
These poems question the sounds that are meaning. They interrogate where meaning resides and whether they are in any way, rigidly or loosely, wed to the words that carry it. There is a nod toward logic and at once an acceptance of its limits. These poems are landscapes, the meaning altering with the movement of clouds, with the changing light. Irony sometimes is the way we can be earnest.
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 rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog. For the plainspoken men and women of these stories―fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians―small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.
In Trout's Lie , Percival Everett explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense—and questions whether either is actually possible.
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 Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.
These sonnets were inspired by the Preludes of Chopin. Do keys matter? Do they speak to different parts of us? Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these experimental sonnets seek to question timbre and tone. That's bullshit. They are just sonnets.