Percival Everett: A Reading Guide

"Pulitzer finalist Percival Everett reimagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Finn’s enslaved friend Jim in his new novel James. In this gripping thriller, Huck Finn has embarked on a journey down the Mississippi River after faking his own death to escape his abusive father, and Jim goes into hiding on an island when he finds out he’s going to be sold into slavery and separated from his family." —TIME's most anticipated books of 2024

"Watershed has all the makings of a social thriller... Everett keeps the storytelling terse and intense, while at the same time broadening the scope of the book, moving into the history of U.S. Indian treaty making and into the science behind the search for water and the pathos of reservation life. In this novel about water and the struggle for a life free of injustice, the mix doesn't just work, it flows." – Alan Cheuse, NPR

"Scathing, funny, and prescient, 20 years after its initial release Erasure remains one of the American literary giant's most striking and beloved works.It's a novel of ideas in conversation with other cultural touchstones and has attracted a legion of well-placed admirers." —NPR

"He has made some audacious leaps over nearly 40 years of writing, but The Trees may be his most audacious. He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece. He turns narrative stakes into moral stakes and raises them sky-high. Readers will laugh until it hurts." —Lorraine Berry in the Los Angeles Times

"A kind of metaphysical caper...Everett has the ability to balance wild comic sensibilities with an unmistakable seriousness of purpose." - The Guardian

"I happily read whatever Percival Everett writes — over 30 books, to date...Sometimes, almost indifferently, one of the novels turns out to be truly exceptional and memorable, and confuses me in the best possible way — in the way that makes it endure in my mind, so that I find I’m still thinking about it in an idle moment on a subway, or while walking up stairs. Everett’s most recent novel, “Telephone,” is one of these standouts." —Rivka Galchen in The New York Times

"Three stories, scattered across time, fuse into one stunning tale in Percival Everett’s latest novel. Each individual strand of So Much Blue has a page-turning urgency of its own — but taken together they add up to a masterpiece..." —Michael Upchurch in The Boston Globe

"Like everything by Everett, America’s best literary chameleon, “Assumption” is many things at once: three discrete novellas braided together into a single story; an old-fashioned murder mystery and a metafictional brain teaser; an existentially bleak story that absolutely delights." —Anthony Domestico in Boston Globe