Percival Everett

PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent novels include National Book Award winner James, Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. His most recent poetry collections include Sonnets for a Missing Key, The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (winner of the 2020 IPPY Award in Most Original Concept) and Trout’s Lie. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
5 products
re: f (gesture)
re: f (gesture)
Percival Everett
Paperback
$18.95
Sonnets for a Missing Key
Sonnets for a Missing Key
Percival Everett
Paperback
$16.95
Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Percival Everett
Paperback
$17.95
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843
Percival Everett
Hardcover
$16.95
Trout's Lie
Trout's Lie
Percival Everett
Paperback
$16.95
Percival Everett

re: f (gesture)

$18.95 Save $-18.95

Praise for Percival Everett:


“. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .”

—Terry D’Auray


“. . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . . ”

—Sven Birkets, The New York Times


“. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .”

—The Boston Globe


“. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.”

—Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

re: f (gesture)
Percival Everett

Sonnets for a Missing Key

$16.95 Save $-16.95

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES • AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION • Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

“One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time.”—Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry • "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."—Library Journal • “Your favorite writer’s writer.”—Entertainment Weekly • “Percival Everett is poised for a big year.”—The Wall Street Journal • Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets.”—Pasadena Star-News • “Wry and epigrammatic.”—Publisher’s Weekly • “A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry.”—Amsterdam News 

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

Sonnets for a Missing Key
Percival Everett

Swimming Swimmers Swimming

$17.95 Save $-17.95
These poems question the sounds that are meaning. They interrogate where meaning resides and whether they are in any way, rigidly or loosely, wed to the words that carry it. There is a nod toward logic and at once an acceptance of its limits. These poems are landscapes, the meaning altering with the movement of clouds, with the changing light. Irony sometimes is the way we can be earnest.
Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Percival Everett

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843

$16.95 Save $-16.95
Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843
Percival Everett

Trout's Lie

$16.95 Save $-16.95
In Trout's Lie, Percival Everett explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense—and questions whether either is actually possible.
Trout's Lie