![]() ![]() ![]() I write fiction.” His oeuvre, which boasts over 30 books (including novels and short story collections), is as consistently surprising as it is vast. As he put it in a 2021 interview, “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly. It’s hard to say what Everett is best known for. For context, I’d just read an Everett novel wherein a man wakes up in his coffin after his own beheading, travels to the desert, and lives with a bunch of clones in an underground government facility. More surprising to me was my friend’s characterization of Everett as a deeply realist author, grounded in the contemporary world and its contemporary issues. My friend was astonished to hear this, sharing that, in France, young academics were building entire careers around studying the work of this single author. I was surprised-I had only just heard of Everett that year, and while I was ravenously making my way through his prolific catalog of novels and short stories, he felt to me like a well-kept secret. In 2018, a French academic pulled me aside at a conference and asked if I thought Percival Everett was the most important novelist in America. ![]()
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