He expects Pafiology to disappear, maybe to amuse a few people or piss off a few editors. The last thing he expects is what actually happens. And this creates a dilemma; actually, more than one. I read Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier immediately after his Erasure and now the two novels have merged in my memory, becoming like one continuous story.

Suddenly, he feels compelled to write down each victim’s name in pencil and erase it. From Emmett Till to Alton Sterling, the list occupies an entire chapter.

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I would let Mr. Leigh continue his reclusive, just-out-of-the-big-house ways. He would talk to the editor a few more times, then disappear, like down a hole. (Everett, Erasure 184) When the care of his demented mother falls onto his shoulders, this ultimate academic decides to write a parody of 'We Lives in Da Ghetto'--with unforeseen consequences. I wondered how far I should take my Stagg Leigh performance. I might in fact become a Rhinehart [sic!], walking down the street and finding myself in store windows. I yam what I yam. I could throw on a fake beard and a wig and do the talk shows, play the game, walk the walk, shoot the jive. No, I couldn’t. Forget also Linda, the white fellow academic who chases Ellison for sex whenever they are in the same city, though she doesn’t seem to enjoy it much. This is all entertaining and thought-provoking stuff, delightfully enraging and engaging, but what matters, ultimately, is Ellison’s beating, aching, breaking heart. It's possibly for this reason that Percival Everett's argument as a novelist is less with individual racists than with the ultimate cause of racism: language and culture.

Our narrator is Wala Kitu, an American mathematician whose specialist subject, “nothing” – the source of too many gags to count – attracts John Sill, a scheming billionaire and would-be Bond villain intent on wiping Washington DC off the map, an endeavour that gets a trial run when he repurposes a space satellite to obliterate a Massachusetts town where “a lot of White racists live”. In 1996, Everett published two books: Watershed has a contemporary western setting, in which the loner hydrologist Robert Hawkes meets a Native American "small person", who helps him come to terms with the inter-relation of people. That year, Everett also published his second collection of stories, Big Picture. [6] I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that sombre city—and go at things as I have taught myself, (...)Marco Rossari, che ha tradotto quattro dei cinque romanzi di Everett pubblicati in Italia, scrive quanto segue: Orion Pictures — the MGM label headed by Alana Mayo — has acquired the feature directorial debut of Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson. Jeffery Wright stars in the project from Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’sT-Street and MRC.

Davis, Clayton (October 23, 2023). "Cord Jefferson's 'American Fiction' Wins Audience Award at Middleburg Film Festival". Variety . Retrieved October 27, 2023.E ci sono anche brevi racconti sulla pesca e sulla falegnameria, i due hobby preferiti dal nostro scrittore protagonista. The use of anaphora, the tendency to use simple, loose sentences, the “false” verb forms, together with the self-reflexive impulse of the speaker/writer, may be interpreted as parodic allusions to Push. Compared to We’s Lives in Da Ghetto , however, the diction of My Pafology seems much less flawed; 10 it is as if Monk, despite his effort to write a trashy novel, were trying to keep at least some modicum of effective command of the language. Or one might even say that the use of an intermediate parodic text serves Everett to invert the parodic process by allowing him to show the relative linguistic superiority of his own protagonist. That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “People will read this shit and believe that there is truth to it.” Steve Pond, " American Fiction Wins Toronto Film Festival’s Audience Award". TheWrap, September 17, 2023. Maus, Derek C., Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire ( University of South Carolina Press; 2019)

Racism is, of course, one of a large family of cultural behaviours which includes misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, among many others. We are told by sociologists that these behaviours are in some sense ‘normal’ because we have a natural human preference for those who are like ourselves. Folk have a right to value what they know and feel familiar with, politicians say. Because such preferences are instinctive, there is really no way to inhibit them, lawyers chime in. Victims shouldn’t take them personally, contend the perpetrators; such behaviour is the consequence of multi-cultural society and must be tolerated. Corporate marketers are just glad they have something on which to hang their promotions. My favorite artist is Basquiat. "Is" because although he is dead, he lives on through the massiveness of his art. Anyone who has seen his art in the flesh (and they do seem to be breathing, layers upon layers of thoughts like skin whispering to be peeled away so that one might uncover their essence) knows that it is as explosive and organic as an expletive after a stubbed toe. Thus "massive" #1. Anyone who was fortunate enough to see him in person or those who have seen stills and recordings of the man knows how influential he was and continues to be in the art world and as a worldwide cultural icon. Thus "massive" #2. The massiveness of his being is awe-inspiringly intimidating, unless you truly believe that you are as great as you would have others believe. But then, you're just insane. Switching genres, Everett next wrote a children's book, The One That Got Away (1992), an illustrated book for young readers that follows three cowboys as they attempt to corral "ones", the mischievous numerals. [9]

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Some called it a throng. A reporter on the scene used the word horde. A minister of an AME church in Jefferson County, Mississippi, called it a congregation . . . and like a tornado it would destroy one life and leave the one beside it unscathed. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. Rise, it said, Rise. It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories. It was weather. Rise. It was a cloud. It was a front, a front of dead air. The hegemony of language and culture will kill the boy, any boy, by putting the pistol in his hand, pointing it at his temple, and pulling the trigger. The boy becomes the vehicle through which the culture kills one of its own. Wounded: A Novel (2005) tells the story of John Hunt, a horse trainer confronted with hate crimes against a homosexual and a Native American. Hunt avoids getting mixed up in the political nature of these crimes, taking action only when he is forced to do so. [14] Corpses are omnipresent in Everett’s fiction, their disruptive energies catalyzing important revelations. In his comic novels, they often fall prey to cultists, body snatchers, and creepy morticians, serving as carnivalesque reminders of the self’s plasticity. In his thrillers, mostly set in the American West, they become traces of atrocities that might otherwise remain invisible: torture, toxic pollution, massacres, femicide. Novels such as“ Watershed” (1996), “ Wounded” (2005), “The Water Cure” (2007), and “ Assumption” (2011) feature loners whose rugged isolation—usually involving a lot of fly-fishing—is interrupted by encounters with the dead, who lure them into deeper currents of violence.