Issue: Winter 2005

Selected Works by Percival Everett

A Man of Many Words

His backlist offers something for just about every reader. Among his 19 books, the best known are Glyph and Erasure. Lesser-known novels and short-story collections, however, traverse a literary landscape of intriguing places, people and styles.

Suder (Viking Press, 1983). In Everett’s lyrical debut novel, a slumping third baseman for the Seattle Mariners struggles both on and off the field: Is his wife cheating on him? Does his son no longer respect him? Forced to take time off, he embarks on a voyage of self-discovery with two goals: to play the saxophone like Charlie Parker and to learn to fly. “A mad work of comic genius,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “combining symbols and myths from ancients and moderns, white culture and black, juxtaposing heartbreaks with farce to make up a narrative that has never, never been told before.”

The One That Got Away (Clarion, 1992) “On the first day out, much to their surprise, they caught one.” Thus begins Percival Everett’s only children’s book. “They” are three wranglers and their shaggy dog. And the “one” they catch is just that – a large numeral 1, fighting back with spindly arms and legs, and teeth bared in a fierce grimace. The puns on “one” keep rolling as the wranglers round up a whole herd of “ones.” Last they go after the tall, fuchsia “one” that got away. Kirkus Review called it “an entertaining spoof” that’s “developed with high style and wit.”

Watershed (Graywolf Press, 1996). In this modern Western, a young hydrologist meets an Indian woman on a fishing trip in the Colorado wilds. Drawn into a mysterious dispute between her tribe and the federal government over water rights, the protagonist begins to see parallels between the civil rights movement and the struggles of Native Americans. The tale – which The New York Times calls “taut” and “important”– is rich in arcana, such as obscure Indian treaties, FBI memos and hydrology reports.

A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (Akashic Books, 2004). This novel starts with the premise that arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond wished to write a history of black Americans, imagining himself a key part of that history. What follows is a series of letters between the senator’s crazed aide (who suggests that Thurmond “is, properly understood, a black writer”), an equally loopy editor at Simon & Schuster, and the authors themselves, academics who agree to ghostwrite the book for the sake of front-row seats to the train wreck.

Damned If I Do (Graywolf Press, 2004). Everett’s “characteristically sardonic humor and his well-modulated moral outrage” are evident throughout this collection of short stories, says the San Francisco Chronicle. His subjects include two aging Hispanic men trying to kill a lion; a reluctant romance writer negotiating filming rights on his ranch; two cowboys trying to wrangle a friend’s wobbly horse and drunk brother, an old man embroiled in a high-speed police chase, and a talented fixer working in a sandwich shop.

Wounded (Graywolf Press, 2005). Everett’s latest novel is a Western-with-a-twist. A gay man turns up dead in a canyon near the Wyoming ranch of an art collector. Suddenly the shadow of hate groups spills across the landscape. When his Native-American neighbor’s cows are shot, the sophisticated protagonist must decide whether and how to deal with racist thugs.

– Shashank Bengali