Percival Everett

‘American literature’s philosopher king – and its sharpest satirist’ The New YorkerOn a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. In Watershed, Percival Everett turns his focus once again to the injustices of recent American history, exploring the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

Premio Pulitzer 2025 * National Award Prize 2024 James es un libro fascinante, una reescritura de Las aventuras de Huckleberry Finn de Mark Twain desde el punto de vista de Jim, el esclavo. Con una inteligencia sobrecogedora, Percival Everett es capaz de demoler las absurdas barreras del racismo. Sentimos la igualdad natural en esta aventura y entendemos que el robo del lenguaje es fundamental en cualquier tipo de esclavitud. En ese sentido, James resuena en nuestro presente. James es el nombre de la dignidad. El esclavo ha visitado de forma clandestina la biblioteca de su amo y ha aprendido a leer y escribir. Entonces, se entera de que lo han vendido y que lo van a separar de su mujer y su hija. Decide escaparse. En esa aventura trepidante lo acompa a Huck. Los dos se convierten en una pareja de personajes que se necesitan mutuamente no solo para sobrevivir, tambi n para conocerse y mantener cierta humanidad. El lenguaje es fundamental en este libro de lectura trepidante construido casi enteramente a trav s del di logo. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Pulitzer Prize 2025 * National Award Prize 2024 James is a fascinating novel--a reimagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man. With staggering insight, Percival Everett dismantles the absurd barriers of racism. We feel the natural equality in this journey and understand that the theft of language is central to every form of enslavement. In that sense, James resonates deeply with our present. James is the name of dignity. The enslaved man has secretly visited his master's library and taught himself to read and write. When he learns he's been sold and will be separated from his wife and daughter, he decides to escape. Huck joins him on this gripping adventure. Together, they become a pair who need each other not only to survive, but to understand themselves and preserve their humanity. Language is at the heart of this fast-paced novel, built almost entirely through dialogue.

‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy’ – The New York TimesDavid Larson can never go home. His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming. There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence. Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

'Truly extraordinary books are rare, and this is one of them' – Roddy DoyleJames is a profound and ferociously funny novel from one of our greatest living writers, Percival Everett. The Sunday Times BestsellerWinner of the National Book Award for FictionWinner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionShortlisted for the Booker PrizeFinalist for the Orwell Prize for FictionThe Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all . . . A 'Book of the Year' in The Observer, The Times & Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Spectator, New Statesman, Independent, TLS, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, i newspaper, The Economist, The Irish Times, The New York Times, TIME and The New Yorker'Who should read this book? Every single person in the country' – Ann Patchett'Scorchingly funny and action-packed' – The Sunday Times, 'Books of the Year''This may be Everett's best book yet' – Bonnie Garmus'Playful and viciously comic' – The Telegraph, 'Books of the Year''My favourite novel this year' – Salman Rushdie

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a comic tour de force from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (adapted into an Oscar-nominated film). The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation. Percival Everett’s novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn’t know what to do with him. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

‘Absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression’ New York TimesSo Much Blue is a gorgeous novel about art, memory and self-deception from the author of Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated film. Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet and three inches, covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know, nor does he particularly care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past: the affair he had with a young artist in Paris ten years ago and, further back, his journey to an El Salvador on the brink of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother. So Much Blue is a brilliant examination of how the past collides with present, and the secrets we keep from even ourselves.'So Much Blue is such a perfectly structured novel . . . A generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America's most under-recognized literary master' NPRPart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees, James and Erasure. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem. Everett skewers race, class, identity, surrealism and much more in this masterful short story collection from one of America's most inventive living writers. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST - ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER - A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg - A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more. "Genius"--The Atlantic - "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."--Chicago Tribune - "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."--The Boston Globe - "Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."--The New York Times When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett's The Trees is a powerful satire of revenge and racial justice in America. A Sunday Times Fiction Book of the YearWinner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic FictionA Sunday Times Novel of the Year'He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece.’ – Los Angeles TimesWhen the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive. Only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America’s violent past. From the author of James, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’ - The New York Times

Dr. No is the spy thriller as you've never read it before, reinvented by Percival Everett, the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees and James. Wala Kitu is a professor of mathematics at Brown University, specializing in nothing. Kitu is content with nothing – studying it, having it, doing it – until his research places him in the sights of billionaire and would-be Bond villain John Sill, who enlists the professor’s help to steal a deposit of nothing from Fort Knox and use it to reduce the United States of America to nothing. Sill wants vengeance for another act of all-American villainy: the murder of his father, a witness to the state-sanctioned assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. His mission is everything: ‘This country has never given anything to us and it never will.''Clever, funny and mercilessly satirical.' – The TimesPart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

An ingenious, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks. With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says,"Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back." Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.

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.

A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know or, more accurately, doesn't care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It's not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can't let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard's drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he's kept from his wife. So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.