Percival Everett
Los Angeles, CA
Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr. No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel James was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller in hardback, and winner of the 2024 National Book Award in Fiction. James was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Fiction. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA.
From the Journal
- Ten Summer Books for the Radical Reader August 17, 2022
- Percival Everett Questions How We Trust Narratives in His New Novel, Telephone May 14, 2020
Telephone
Percival Everett has been publishing novels since 1983.
Artist BioZach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.
A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.
Telephone was published by Graywolf Press in May 5, 2020.
From the Journal
We spoke to Percival Everett about his Creative Capital Project, Telephone, a new novel published by Graywolf Press, which comes in three different versions.