Erasure, Percival Everett
Erasure, Percival Everett
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Erasure
A Novel

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Sean Crisden

Unabridged: 8 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/26/2023


Synopsis

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now as the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross.

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a literary shapeshifter, an author whose work defies genre and expectation. Born in 1956, he has carved out a career as one of America’s most daring and intellectually playful writers, blending satire, philosophy, and social critique across novels, short stories, and poetry. With a bibliography spanning dozens of books-including Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, a Pulitzer Prize finalist-Everett tackles race, identity, and the absurdities of modern life with razor-sharp wit and profound depth.

A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett is also an accomplished painter, musician, and horse trainer, embodying the restless curiosity that defines his fiction. His work, often compared to that of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, resists easy categorization, making him one of contemporary literature’s most unpredictable and essential voices.


Reviews

Goodreads review by MJ on March 05, 2024

A strange blend of family drama and razor-sharp satire. Thelonious Ellison is an academic writer in the mould of Barthes or Derrida, whose unreadable works upset and alienate colleagues and readers. Riled by the rise of cheap and racist "ghetto-lit," he pens a satire against the genre, which becomes......more

Goodreads review by Meike on March 20, 2024

The premise of this book is just fantastic: A Black writer has trouble selling books, because his sound and themes are considered not Black enough, so he crafts a parody of a ghetto novel that appeals to the white gaze and - bam! - makes big bucks and sells movie rights. As this is Percival Everett,......more

Goodreads review by Andy on March 15, 2023

Percival Everett is a very funny and very clever writer. Erasure, however, was not as funny as it might have been and far too clever for its own good. The characters were well written, and the satire was razor-sharp, but there were too many Latin quotes and obscure cultural references for my liking.......more

Goodreads review by Eugene on September 06, 2016

ERASURE was published eight years ago, in 2001, before the J.T. Leroy hoax was outed and before the eerily echoing current debate over the film PRECIOUS. it's hard to discuss the novel without talking about its elaborate plot and book-within-a-book structure. here's PW's gloss: Thelonius "Monk" Ellis......more