Percival L. Everett

Ishmael Kidder takes revenge by any means necessary when his eleven-year-old daughter is brutally murdered, in a novel that follows the gruesome reasoning and execution of revenge in a society that has lost a common moral ground.

"Wilhelm Worringer's landmark study in the interpretation of modern art, first published in 1908, has seldom been out of print. Its profound impact not only on art historians and theorists but on generations of creative writers and intellectuals is almost unprecedented. Starting from the notion that beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, Worringer argues that representational art produces satisfaction from our "objectified delight in the self," reflecting a confidence in the world as it is - as in Renaissance art. By contrast, the urge to abstraction, as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, primitive, or modern expressionist art, articulates a totally different response to the world: it expresses man's insecurity. Thus in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms. In his Introduction to Abstraction and Empathy, Hilton Kramer calls the book "one of the key documents in the literature of modernism." He considers the influence of Worringer's thesis and places Abstraction and Empathy in historical context, showing how its ideas are very much alive today."--BOOK JACKET.

Movie titled re-release - originally published as "Goodbye, Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square"

Roman initiatique

"Vietnam veteran David Larson can't go home again. Instead the Georgia native wanders westward into the desolate landscape of Slut's Hole, Wyoming, and seeks to integrate himself amid a hardscrabble cast of memorable locals. David is taken in by Sixbury, a one-legged widow, sheep farmer, and mother to a nearly adult mentally handicapped son. This rough-hewn family unit is later augmented when David becomes the unwilling guardian to Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at a highway rest stop. A tragic turn of events moves the novel into violent territory that bridges western laconic traditions with southern gothic and interrogates our notions of home, family, duty, and the always uncertain responsibilities of the individual in society. First published in 1985, Walk Me to the Distance was Percival Everett's second novel, a hauntingly dark tragicomedy of the modern West, still clinging to a mythical heritage and code of frontier justice. With spare strokes Everett paints a telling landscape of big-sky country, where the mere act of living can be hard, cruel, and heart-stopping. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction by the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies"-- "At the heart of Walk Me to the Distance are tensions that seem to mirror those shaping the competing cultural mythologies of the South and the West: nurturing community vs. radical individualism; place vs. space; the burdensome past vs. the unimagined future--or put more simply, roots vs. routes. But in the story of David Larson, a Vietnam veteran on a road trip into the West, Everett complicates these tensions, in a sense remixing and merging the cultural mythologies, showing us a West that in the end comes to look a good bit like the South, at least in terms of the issues, concerns, and loyalties that shape the lives of the people who live there. When we first meet David, he is headed out from Savannah, Georgia, forsaking home and family (what little there's left) for unknown territory and an unmapped future. After some wayward traveling and mishaps, he ends up on a Wyoming sheep ranch, with an elderly woman, Sixbury, and her mentally challenged son. Rather than moving on, David unexpectedly decides to settle in, committing himself to Sixbury and the ranch, as well as to the community at large. "He'd found a home," David comments. "He liked the people and he loved the terrain." But as David soon learns, the bitterly harsh and largely empty Western landscape, for all its stark beauty, pushes people toward the instinctual and tribal. He learns, too, that commitments to others bring responsibilities that often demand acts simultaneously heroic and terrible"--

"In Percival Everett's sixth book of dark, comic moralizing on the fate of the planet, its people, and the absurd Meaning of It All, readers are taken into the pitiable life of Alice Achitophel, a grotesquely obese government clerk, social outcast, and, apparently, the world's only fertile woman in the aftermath of worldwide nuclear holocaust. The ultimate question is humanity's survival". -- San Francisco Chronicle New American Writing Award.

"In Wounded Ronald J. Glasser, M.D., who served as an army hospital physician during the Vietnam war, offers an unparalleled description of the horror endured daily by our troops on the ground. In this critical analysis, the focus is on our wounded soldiers, from the initial cause of injury on to the long road of recovery. Throughout, Glasser draws significant and frightening comparisons between our medical experiences in Vietnam and Iraq."--Jacket.

In his stunning new novel God's Country, Percival Everett offers a wickedly funny rewrite of the Great American western. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. He has 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 is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba. This odd couple is soon joined by Jake, a wayward child determined to join the hunt. As Jake and Marder follow Bubba across desolate, unsettled land, they meet Indians, settlers, and soldiers. Aiming to keep a low profile, they nevertheless find themselves in all kinds of trouble, including run-ins with a scurrilous preacher, a flamboyant prostitute, and General Custer in a nightgown. A natural coward, Marder only survives these incidents because of Bubba's reluctant heroism. However, even after their final, chilling exchange, Marder fails to realize that Bubba's secrets extend beyond his ability to track footprints on the prairie. God's Country is hilarious and haunting by turns, a slam-bang parable of the way things were in 1871.

"For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's--and arguably the world's--premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/ Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded--the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize. Interviews collected in this volume, several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time, display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work's being described as "characteristically uncharacteristic." At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about "Jim Crow," a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more."--Publisher's website.

Three cowhands chase and corral ones in this zany book about the Wild West.

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.

"A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in high-speed 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."--BOOK JACKET.

"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."--www.amazon.com.

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We's Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh. Ellison quickly finds himself with a six-figure advance from a major house, a multimillion-dollar offer for the movie rights and a monster bestseller on his hands. The money helps with a family crisis, allowing Ellison to care for his widowed mother as she drifts into the fog of Alzheimer's, but it doesn't ease the pain after his sister, a physician, is shot by right-wing fanatics for performing abortions. The dark side of wealth surfaces when both the movie mogul and talk-show host demand to meet the nonexistent Leigh, forcing Ellison to don a disguise and invent a sullen, enigmatic character to meet the demands of the market. The final indignity occurs when Ellison becomes a judge for a major book award and My Pafology (title changed to Fuck) gets nominated, forcing the author to come to terms with his perverse literary joke. Percival's talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness. (Sept. 21)Forecast: Everett has been well-reviewed before, but his latest far surpasses his previous efforts. Passionate word of mouth (of which there should be plenty), rave reviews (ditto) and the startling cover (a young, smiling black boy holding a toy gun to his head) could help turn this into a genuine publishing event.