![]() ![]() Since the beginning of his career, he has almost exclusively published with independent presses. The irony and money were both tempting, but Everett turned Doubleday down. Indeed, the joke proves not far off the mark: When Doubleday launched its African American imprint, Harlem Moon, the publisher made him an offer for the paperback reprint rights for Erasure. Everett ridicules the publishing industry’s tendency to ghettoize and fetishize writers of color in his novel Erasure (2001), when an obscure black experimental novelist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison hits it big with My Pafology, a pseudonymous parody of a best-selling memoir, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by an Oberlin graduate. The recognition hasn’t deterred his satiric impulse. ![]() This has earned Everett a cult following, praise from his peers and critics, innumerable awards, including the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, the New American Writing Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. But his devotion to craft is matched only by his aversion to the business of publishing. Percival Everett is one of America’s most imaginative and industrious contemporary fiction writers, publishing fourteen novels (and three story collections) in as many years. ![]()
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