Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Conversations with Percival Everett
    Conversations with Percival Everett
    Conversations with Percival Everett
    Ebook326 pages3 hours

    Conversations with Percival Everett

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's—and arguably the world's—premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded—the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize.

    Interviews collected in this volume—several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time—display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work being described as “characteristically uncharacteristic.” At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about “Jim Crow,” a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Press of Mississippi
    Release dateJun 12, 2013
    ISBN9781496806499
    Conversations with Percival Everett

    Related to Conversations with Percival Everett

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Q&A With Danielle Evans, Author Of ‘The Office Of Historical Corrections’

      Jan 12, 2021

      “In my stories, I explore that space between what we think and what we say out loud, between what we actually want and how we behave,” says Ms. Evans.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Joshua Ferris Writes a Work of Hope

      Aug 2, 2021

      This was always going to be about Joshua Ferris’s dad. “You catch me pretty fresh,” the author deadpans over Zoom. “I haven’t talked about it.” The “it” refers to his long-awaited new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which publishes in September.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Siege of Clarice Lispector

      Apr 30, 2019

      The Siege of Clarice Lispector
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno

      Dec 12, 2019

      I am at this point in my life where I find these lists voluptuous brags about time, which I have surely been party to in the past. The post A Year in Reading: Kate Zambreno appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

      Feb 1, 2019

      Shields has composed a portrait of the complicated author and the darknesses that drove Williams to write, to overcompensate, to philander, to mansplain. The post Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson

      Dec 2, 2022

      Chantal V. Johnson reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      When We Were Birds

      Jan 26, 2022

      RELEASED 10 FEBRUARY 288 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo Publisher Hamish Hamilton By the time you read this, review, the days will be getting longer. At the time of writing it, though, we’re firmly in the darkest time of t

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • Article

      September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Sep 1, 2022

      These are the 27 books that we can't wait to read this month. The post September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Odd, Prescient, Intense, Brilliant: Remembering Paula Fox

      Mar 7, 2017

      Paula Fox, author of many works of literature for children as well as a handful of brilliant adult novels and two memoirs, died this week in Brooklyn at the age of 93. Famously, though her novels were well-reviewed—particularly her 1970 magnum opus D

      5 min read

    • Article

      Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview

      Jul 15, 2021

      We've just an entered an amazing six-month stretch for book-lovers. The post Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

      47 min read

    • Article

      Tommy Orange

      Jun 13, 2018

      whose debut novel, There There, was published in June by Knopf. INTRODUCED BY Claire Vaye Watkins author of two books, including the novel Gold Fame Citrus, published by Riverhead Books in 2015. The first thing one not ices about There There, Tommy O

      4 min read

    • Article

      Jenny Offill Exerts Herself

      Jan 15, 2020

      I don’t love the language that’s available to talk about this stuff. If you’re not drawn to earnestness, how do you make yourself a more engaged person? The post Jenny Offill Exerts Herself appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Conversations with Percival Everett

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Good read into the insight of a private average joe author.

    Book preview

    Conversations with Percival Everett - Joe Weixlmann

    On Writing: Visiting Author Brings a Love of Craft to Classroom

    Fred Kirsch / 1994

    From The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), 26 February 1994, B1. Copyright © 2012. The Virginian-Pilot. Reprinted with permission.

    They’d been reading his short stories and novels for weeks, but they didn’t quite know what to expect when Percival Everett came to Virginia Wesleyan College.

    They thought he’d be, well, older. And serious. His writing was so spare and lean and to the point.

    And probably a white guy. They were white, those doctors and hunters and guys hanging around Carlton’s garage and that huge three-hundred-pound woman he wrote about, weren’t they?

    But when Everett arrived on campus to spend two weeks as a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest writing fellow, students discovered you can’t judge a book by its cover. Or a writer by his subjects.

    Everett turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old black man who not only, according to one student, is an awesome writer but also a guy who talked their language. A guy who knew all about staring at blank computer screens.

    To be able to actually sit down and talk to an author you’ve been reading is just an incredible opportunity, said Melody Budzina, a sophomore who sat in on one of the many classes Everett spoke to.

    You get so much more out of something like this. Even though we’re students, he said a lot of things we could identify with.

    He should have.

    Everett wasn’t much older than the two dozen students sitting in front of him on a recent morning in an English 112 class when he wrote his first novel, Suder, about a baseball player who falls into a horrendous slump that brings on a constellation of off-field problems.

    It was published when he was twenty-four. Now he’s at work on his sixth and seventh novels, writing short stories in between.

    Writing is more than putting words on paper. It’s a way of life, Everett says.

    Everett will return to Virginia Wesleyan in the fall as part of the national Writing Fellows Program, whose purpose is to stimulate greater appreciation for the written word on campuses.

    Virginia Wesleyan is one of eighteen colleges selected this year (there will be sixty over the next four years) for the program, which is administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and is the largest of its kind in the country.

    If you have to write and you don’t, you’re going to be miserable, he tells the students. You’ve got to write. That’s the way it was for me. If it’s in you, let it out. But keep the day job.

    By day, Everett, a lean, immaculate man, is a professor of creative writing at the University of California–Riverside. But by night and at heart, he’s a writer. A writer’s writer.

    You have to love the craft first is one of the messages he brought to a class of students the other day. "The work is more important than you. And if it’s good it will last a lot longer. It has the potential to endure. You

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1