Telephone

Telephone PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1761561456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres 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.

Telephone

Telephone PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1761561456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres 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.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970656
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." —Wall Street Journal * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction * A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust? Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.

Erasure

Erasure PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970397
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright 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.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

I Am Not Sidney Poitier PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970192
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
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?"

So Much Blue

So Much Blue PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979742
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
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.

Summary of Percival Everett’s James

Summary of Percival Everett’s James PDF Author: Milkyway Media
Publisher: Milkyway Media
ISBN:
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 25

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Book Description
Buy now to get the main key ideas from Percival Everett’s James James (2024) by best-selling author Percival Everett is a new take on the 1885 classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Jim, a slave in Hannibal, Missouri, learns that he is facing separation from his family. He hides on Jackson Island, where he meets Huck Finn, a white boy who has escaped his abusive father. They embark on a perilous journey on the Mississippi River, as Jim seeks both his freedom and his family. Jim’s intelligence and resilience are evident as he teaches Huck about survival and the harsh realities of slavery.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond PDF Author:
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617752134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
“A truly funny sendup of the corrupt politics of academe, the publishing industry and politics, as well as a subtle but biting critique of racial ideology.” —Publishers Weekly This “hilarious high-concept satire” (Publishers Weekly), by the PEN/Faulkner finalist and acclaimed author of Telephone and Erasure, is a fictitious and satirical 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, The 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. “Outrageously funny . . . it could become a cult classic.” —Library Journal “I think Percival Everett is a genius. I’ve been a fan since his first novel . . . He’s a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him.” —Terry McMillan, New York Times-bestselling author of It’s Not All Downhill from Here “God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics.”?The Wall Street Journal

Half an Inch of Water

Half an Inch of Water PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1555977197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
A collection of short stories centered around the West includes tales of a deaf Native American girl wandering in the desert and a young boy coping with the death of his sister by angling for trout in the creek where she drowned.

Assumption

Assumption PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970389
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
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.

Glyph

Glyph PDF Author: Percival Everett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571221127
Category : Gifted children
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
With this wildly inventive and funny novel, Percival Everett has created his unlikeliest hero to date. Mute by choice but able to read complex philosophical treatises and ponder the worth (not much) of Derrida and Barthes, baby Ralph is considered mentally 'challenged' by his father. On discovery of his unusual talents, however, there is soon a whole host of people eager for a stake in this child prodigy. Among the most fiendish are Dr Steimell, the psychiatrist; Dr Davis and her illegal chimps; and Nana, the secret agent. All have plans for baby Ralph who misses his mother terribly and doesn't warm to his role as 'Defence Stealth Operative 1369'. As the pursuit of Ralph across America gathers pace we are treated to intellectual conundrums and words of wisdom that perhaps only a baby could dream up.