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 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.

Not a Big Deal asks how texts might work to unsettle readers at a moment when unwelcome information is rejected as fake news or rebutted with alternative facts. When readers already recognize "defamiliarizing texts" as a category, how might texts still work toward the goals of defamiliarization? When readers refuse to grapple with texts that might shock them or disrupt their extant views about politics, race, or even narrative itself, how can texts elicit real engagement? This study draws from philosophy, narratology, social neuroscience, critical theory, and numerous other disciplines to read texts ranging from novels and short stories to graphic novels, films, and fiction broadcasted and podcasted--all of which enact curious strategies of disruption while insisting that they do no such thing. Following a model traceable to Toni Morrison's criticism and short fiction, texts by Kyle Baker, Scott Brown, Percival Everett, Daniel Handler, David Robert Mitchell, Jordan Peele, and Colson Whitehead suggest new strategies for unsettling the category-based perceptions behind what Everett calls "the insidious colonialist reader's eye which infects America." Not a Big Deal examines problems in our perception of the world and of texts and insists we do the same.

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

How many layers of artifice can one artwork contain? How does forgery unsettle our notions of originality and creativity? Looking at both the literary and art worlds, Fake It investigates a set of fictional forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations and parallels. Mark Osteen shows how any forgery or hoax is only as good as its authenticating story—and demonstrates how forgeries foster fresh authorial identities while being deeply intertextual and frequently quite original. From fakes of the late eighteenth century, such as Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems and the notorious "Shakespearean" documents fabricated by William-Henry Ireland, to hoaxes of the modern period, such as Clifford Irving’s fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the infamous Ern Malley forgeries, and the audacious authorial masquerades of Percival Everett, Osteen lays bare provocative truths about the conflicts between aesthetic and economic value. In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.

Percival Everett writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collections of short fiction, three poetry collections, and one children's book, his work has not garnered the critical attention that it deserves. Perhaps one of the most vexing problems black and white scholars have had in trying to situate Everett's work is that they have found it difficult to "place" him and his work within a prescribed African American literary tradition. Because he happens to be African American, critics have expectations of so-called "authentic" African American fiction; however, his work often thwarts these expectations. In Perspectives on Percival Everett, scholars engage all of his creative production. On the one hand, Everett is an African American novelist. On the other hand, he pursues subject matters that seemingly have little to do with African American culture. The operative word here is "seemingly"; for as these essays demonstrate, Everett's works falls well within as well as outside of what most critics would deem the African American literary tradition. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions--issues essential to understanding his aesthetic and political concerns.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame, it’s long been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers. In that tradition, determined for the bookshop to remain a place of meaningful and transformative conversation, owner Sylvia Whitman and novelist and literary director Adam Biles have hosted several hundred interviews with writers, ranging from prize-winning novelists to visionary non-fiction writers. The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews is a selection of the best of these interviews from the last decade. Packed with warmth, sensitivity and humour, it’s a celebration of the greatest writers of our age and an insight into the lives and thoughts behind some of today’s most talked-about books.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is a story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his ageing 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? 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 enquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire; Percival Everett's Erasure; Toni Morrison's Jazz; Bonnie Greer's Hanging by Her Teeth; Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure; and Xam Wilson Cartiér's Muse-Echo Blues. Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West.

This book presents a skeptical eliminativist philosophy of race and the theory of racelessness, a methodological and pedagogical framework for analyzing "race" and racism. It explores the history of skeptical eliminativism and constructionist eliminativism within the history of African American philosophy and literary studies and its consistent connection with movements for civil rights. Sheena M. Mason considers how current anti-racist efforts reflect naturalist conservationist and constructionist reconstructionist philosophies of race that prevent more people from fully confronting the problem of racism, not race, thereby enabling racism to persist. She then offers a three-part solution for how scholars and people aspiring toward anti-racism can avoid unintentionally upholding racism, using literary studies as a case study to show how "race" often translates into racism itself. The theory of racelessness helps more people undo racism by undoing the belief in "race."