
Percival Everett
Award-winning Novelist & Story Writer
NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Winner


Readings &
Lecture Topics
- An Evening with Percival Everett
Biography
“Everett has cultivated a reputation for his vast, genre-defying and sometimes gleefully unhinged body of work.” —New York Times
“Percival’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“If part of the mission of the artist is to expand the thinking of the culture in which he exists, I have my work cut out for me.” —Percival Everett
“There are two kinds of readers in America: those who are reading Percival Everett, and those who are missing out.” –National Book Critics Circle Judges Citation
The May 2020 New York Times headline reading “Percival Everett Has a Book or Three Coming Out” deftly describes the magnitude of Percival Everett’s distinguished career. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections, including Dr. NO (2022); The Trees (2021), which won the 2022 Ainisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize; Telephone (2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in fiction; So Much Blue (2017); Glyph (2014); Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013); I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009); and Erasure (2001), all published by Graywolf Press. His most recent novel, Telephone, has three different endings, depending on the version you read—and you can’t know ahead of time which ending you will get. It is a deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us: a Percival Everett novel that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save. In a recent interview about the variable endings, he stated, “I’m interested not in the authority of the artist, but the authority of the reader.”
Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, Dos Passos Prize, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, The 2010 Believer Book Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, a Creative Capital Award, BS the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories, and they are often featured on Selected Shorts, a radio program aired on NPR from Symphony Space in NYC.
Percival Everett was born in 1956 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. After graduating from the University of Miami, he began a philosophy degree at the University of Oregon, then transferred to a master’s program in fiction at Brown, where he wrote his first book, Suder. In 1989, he was invited to address the South Carolina State Legislature, but during his speech refused to continue because of the presence of the Confederate flag, thus touching off a controversy that ended with the flag being removed from the Capitol building some years later. He was inspired by this experience to write his powerful and funny story “The Appropriation of Cultures.”
Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.
Short Bio
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections, including Dr. NO, The Trees, Telephone, So Much Blue, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure. Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Dos Passos Prize, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, The 2010 Believer Book Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, a Creative Capital Award, BS the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.
Videos
Publications
Dr. NO
Novel, 2022
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.
The Trees
Fiction, 2021
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.
Telephone
Novel, 2020
“Sometimes, almost indifferently, one of Everett’s novel’s turns out to be truly exceptional and memorable, and confuses me in the best possible way. Telephone is one of these standouts.” — Rivka Galchen
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, 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.
So Much Blue
Novel, 2017
“A generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America’s most under-recognized literary master.” — NPR
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.
Half an Inch of Water
Novel, 2015
“What is most enchanting about Half an Inch of Water is the rumor of magic constantly on the periphery, the inexplicable that emerges from and then retreats back into the haze of the desert.” — The New York Times Book Review
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 beloved dog that had died years before. 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 Percival Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.
Percival Everett By Virgil Russell
Novel, 2013
“A stark, shattering novel. Everett is a scandalously under-recognized contemporary master.This meta-fiction is deeply moving.” — Wall Street Journal
A story unfolds inside a story as a man visits his aging father in a nursing home. Each man tells overlapping tales: A painter meets a long-lost daughter. A man named Murphy can’t distinguish between the brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. Anecdotes from the nursing home intertwine and crest in a wild excursion of the inmates. All the while a running commentary from father and son anchors the shifting plotlines and sheds doubt on their truthfulness. A powerful meditation on the humiliations of old age, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this, his most important and elusive novel to date.
Damned if I Do
Short Stories, 2004
“Damned If I Do is underpinned by a quiet intelligence and an acute sense of place.”—The New York Times Book Review
An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly-fisherman, and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. Two men are faced with a horse who is wildly afraid of the dark. 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 mouth full of crooked teeth, thirty-twoparking tickets, and a sexual identity problem.
Wounded
Novel, 2005
“Starts rhapsodically and rewards the reader with so many moments of love and laughter—Wounded is full of shocks and surprises.”—Los Angeles Times
Training horses is dangerous—a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly 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, Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Novel, 2009
“Not only is the novel smart and without a trace of pretentiousness, it shows Everett as a novelist at the height of his narrative and satirical powers.” — Publisher’s Weekly
I Am 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?”
Assumption
Novel, 2011
“The setting, the protagonist and the eccentric and pathetic cast of characters will haunt you long after you close the book.” — The New York Times Book Review
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.
Erasure
Novel, 2001
“With equal measures of sympathy and satire, Erasure craftily addresses the highly charged issue of being ‘black enough’ in America.”—NPR
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.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Percival Everett’s The Trees Longlisted for the Booker Prize – Booker Prizes
• Percival Everett: ‘I’d love to write a novel everyone hated’ – The Guardian
• 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners – Anisfield Wolf
• Toward an Alternative Canon of Trauma Literature: A Reading List – LitHub
• Confederate Dunces: On Percival Everett’s The Trees – LA Review of Books
• Percival Everett Has a Book or Three Coming Out – New York Times
• Best Book of 2019: I am Not Sidney Poitier — Granta
• The Art of Fiction No. 235—The Paris Review
• The Unavoidable Percival Everett – LA Review of Books
• So Much Blue Is Percival Everett’s Best Yet– NPR
Listen to Audio
• For Prolific Author Percival Everett, The Wilderness Is A Place Of Clarity – NPR
Selected Writings
Dr. No (an excerpt)
It was my expertise in nothing, not absolutely nothing, but positively nothing, that led me to work with, rather for, one John Milton Bradley Sill, a self-made billionaire with one goal, a goal that might have been intriguing to some, confounding and weird to most, idiotic to all, but at least easily articulated. John Milton Bradley Sill aspired to be a Bond villain, the fictitious nature of James Bond notwithstanding. He put like this: “I want to be a Bond villain.” Simple.
We were sitting in a coffee shop on Thayer Street. It was eight on a Monday morning in November, the semester winding down and so the students who had dragged themselves in there were nearly sleepwalking. I was much like them. I had discovered only recently that I needed a full twelve hours of sleep to function properly but had sat up much of the night thinking about the meeting with Sill. I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.
“What do you mean by Bond villain?”
Sill held a spoon like a cigarette. “You know, the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy to thwart me. You know, evil for evil’s sake.”
“A sort of modernist villain,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I stared and stirred my tea. I didn’t want to look at him, but I did, realizing, as he came into focus, that he was certifiable. But jolly. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, slightly racially ambiguous, an equine face and tightly curled hair. He was a slight man. “You look too nice to be a villain,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Appearances are only that.”
“Have you ever performed an evil deed?”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked. “Bond villains kill indiscriminately.” I was speaking out of my ass. I didn’t know the first thing about Bond villains.
“Some do, some don’t.” Sill poked the air with his spoon. “Have you ever seen Goldfinger?”
“I think so. Let’s say no.”
“Goldfinger robs Fort Knox.”
Sunday Morning
Book excerpt: “Dr. No” by Percival Everett
sunday-morning
It was my expertise in nothing, not absolutely nothing, but positively nothing, that led me to work with, rather for, one John Milton Bradley Sill, a self-made billionaire with one goal, a goal that might have been intriguing to some, confounding and weird to most, idiotic to all, but at least easily articulated. John Milton Bradley Sill aspired to be a Bond villain, the fictitious nature of James Bond notwithstanding. He put like this: “I want to be a Bond villain.” Simple.
We were sitting in a coffee shop on Thayer Street. It was eight on a Monday morning in November, the semester winding down and so the students who had dragged themselves in there were nearly sleepwalking. I was much like them. I had discovered only recently that I needed a full twelve hours of sleep to function properly but had sat up much of the night thinking about the meeting with Sill. I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.
“What do you mean by Bond villain?”
Sill held a spoon like a cigarette. “You know, the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy to thwart me. You know, evil for evil’s sake.”
“A sort of modernist villain,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I stared and stirred my tea. I didn’t want to look at him, but I did, realizing, as he came into focus, that he was certifiable. But jolly. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, slightly racially ambiguous, an equine face and tightly curled hair. He was a slight man. “You look too nice to be a villain,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Appearances are only that.”
“Have you ever performed an evil deed?”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked. “Bond villains kill indiscriminately.” I was speaking out of my ass. I didn’t know the first thing about Bond villains.
“Some do, some don’t.” Sill poked the air with his spoon. “Have you ever seen Goldfinger?”
“I think so. Let’s say no.”
“Goldfinger robs Fort Knox.”
“Where they keep the gold,” I said.
“Where they keep the gold.” John Sill looked around, measuring everyone in the room. “Do you know what’s actually in the vault of Fort Knox?”
“I don’t.”
He leaned forward, actually resting his chin on the palm of his hand, like a lover or at least like someone who had known me for more than a quarter hour, and said, “Nothing.”
“You mean there is no gold there.”
“I mean there is nothing there.”
“Nothing,” I said.
Sunday Morning
Book excerpt: “Dr. No” by Percival Everett
sunday-morning
November 13, 2022 / 7:36 AM / CBS News
It’s not James Bond. “Dr. No” is author Percival Everett’s clever comic romp about a math professor who specializes in the study of nothingness, whose work attracts the attention of a supervillain.
Read an excerpt below.
dr-no-graywolf-press-cover.jpg
Graywolf Press
It was my expertise in nothing, not absolutely nothing, but positively nothing, that led me to work with, rather for, one John Milton Bradley Sill, a self-made billionaire with one goal, a goal that might have been intriguing to some, confounding and weird to most, idiotic to all, but at least easily articulated. John Milton Bradley Sill aspired to be a Bond villain, the fictitious nature of James Bond notwithstanding. He put like this: “I want to be a Bond villain.” Simple.
We were sitting in a coffee shop on Thayer Street. It was eight on a Monday morning in November, the semester winding down and so the students who had dragged themselves in there were nearly sleepwalking. I was much like them. I had discovered only recently that I needed a full twelve hours of sleep to function properly but had sat up much of the night thinking about the meeting with Sill. I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.
“What do you mean by Bond villain?”
Sill held a spoon like a cigarette. “You know, the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy to thwart me. You know, evil for evil’s sake.”
“A sort of modernist villain,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I stared and stirred my tea. I didn’t want to look at him, but I did, realizing, as he came into focus, that he was certifiable. But jolly. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, slightly racially ambiguous, an equine face and tightly curled hair. He was a slight man. “You look too nice to be a villain,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Appearances are only that.”
“Have you ever performed an evil deed?”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked. “Bond villains kill indiscriminately.” I was speaking out of my ass. I didn’t know the first thing about Bond villains.
“Some do, some don’t.” Sill poked the air with his spoon. “Have you ever seen Goldfinger?”
“I think so. Let’s say no.”
“Goldfinger robs Fort Knox.”
“Where they keep the gold,” I said.
“Where they keep the gold.” John Sill looked around, measuring everyone in the room. “Do you know what’s actually in the vault of Fort Knox?”
“I don’t.”
He leaned forward, actually resting his chin on the palm of his hand, like a lover or at least like someone who had known me for more than a quarter hour, and said, “Nothing.”
“You mean there is no gold there.”
“I mean there is nothing there.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Precisely that. I am not telling you that there is no gold there. I’m telling you that there is nothing there. What you have been looking for.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Still, I was convinced he meant that the vault was empty.
“I’m telling you that the vault is not empty.” As if reading my mind.
“And?”
“You, my friend, are going to help me steal it. I’ve done my research. You know more about nothing than anyone. How much power must there be for anyone who can possess nothing.”