Book Series Guide
Percival Everett

Author guide

Percival Everett Books in Order

Percival Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His wide-ranging work includes novels, short stories, poetry, children's literature, and experimental multi-genre books, often combining satire, metafiction, philosophical inquiry, and sustained engagement with race, language, history, and American literary traditions. His notable works include Erasure, The Trees, and James, which won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

literary fictionexperimental fictionsatireshort storiespoetrychildren's literature

Catalog record updated .

Percival Everett's Newest Book

Cover of James

James

novel · First published 2024

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.

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

Cover of Erasure

Erasure

A widely accessible introduction to Everett's satire, metafiction, and engagement with race and publishing.

Cover of The Trees

The Trees

A darkly comic mystery that showcases his historical imagination and genre-crossing style.

Cover of James

James

His acclaimed later novel and a powerful reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Outside the series

Bibliography by category

Novels (23)
  1. Suder

    novel · 1983

  2. Walk Me to the Distance

    novel · 1985

    "Vietnam veteran David Larson can't go home again. Instead the Georgia native wanders westward into the desolate landscape of Slut's Hole, Wyoming, and seeks to integrate himself amid a hardscrabble cast of memorable locals. David is…

  3. Cutting Lisa

    novel · 1986

  4. For Her Dark Skin

    novel · 1990

  5. Zulus

    novel · 1990

  6. God's Country

    novel · 1994

  7. Watershed

    novel · 1996

    A rediscovered classic of politics, murder, espionage, for the first time in paperback On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over…

  8. Frenzy

    novel · 1997

  9. Glyph

    novel · 1999

    In paperback for the first time, the much-beloved satirical novel The New York Times praised as "both a treatise and a romp" Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don't include staring at a mobile. Aided by his mother,…

  10. Grand Canyon, Inc.

    novella · 2001

    Big-game hunter Rhino Tanner seeks to develop the Grand Canyon into an amusement park but unleashes forces that he cannot comprehend or control.

  11. Erasure

    novel · 2001

    Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to…

  12. American Desert

    novel · 2004

    "As American Desert opens, the novel's hero, Theodore Street, is driving toward the ocean, where he plans to walk into the waves and drown himself. But on his way, he is hit headlong by an oncoming van. He sails through the windshield,…

  13. Wounded

    novel · 2005

    Explores issues of masculinity and homosexuality against a Western American backdrop, charting the effects of a fatal gay bashing incident on the lives of a father and son living in Wyoming.

  14. The Water Cure

    novel · 2007

    I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I executed these actions with not only deliberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose . . . The true…

  15. I Am Not Sidney Poitier

    novel · 2009

    Roman initiatique

  16. Assumption

    novel · 2011

    "In the sleepy New Mexico backwater of Plata, Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker spends his time humoring his portly boss, chasing vandals, and fly-fishing. But when a woman is murdered under strange circumstances, his life takes a turn for the…

  17. So Much Blue

    novel · 2017

    "Kevin Pace's latest painting, like so much of his past, remains a secret. Ten years ago, he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. And in the late 1970s, he traveled to El Salvador to search for his best friend's brother, a…

  18. Telephone

    novel · 2020

    An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from “one of our culture’s preeminent novelists” (Los Angeles Times) Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history…

  19. The Trees

    novel · 2021

    An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi.…

  20. Dr. No

    novel · 2022

    A professor of mathematics who claims to be an expert at nothing partners with an aspiring villain who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal a shoebox containing nothing, with the help of a brainwashed astrophysicist.

  21. James

    novel · 2024

    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…

Short fiction (5)
  1. The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

    short-story-collection · 1987

  2. Big Picture

    short-story-collection · 1996

  3. Damned If I Do

    short-story-collection · 2004

    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…

  4. Half an Inch of Water

    short-story-collection · 2015

  5. Two Stories

    short-story-collection · 2018

Children's books (1)
  1. The One That Got Away

    children's-book · 1992

Poetry (3)
  1. re:f (gesture)

    poetry-collection · 2006

  2. Swimming Swimmers Swimming

    poetry-collection · 2011

  3. Trout's Lie

    poetry-collection · 2015

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

Collaborations (3)
  1. A History of the African-American People (Proposed)

    coauthored-novel · 2004

    In A History of the African-American People [Proposed], Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Percival Everett (James) and James Kincaid present a fictitious chronicle of former South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond’s desire to pen a history of…

  2. Abstraktion und Einfühlung

    coauthored-poetry-collection · 2008

  3. There Are No Names for Red

    coauthored-poetry-and-art-book · 2010

Other (1)

Frequently asked questions about Percival Everett

Who is Percival Everett?

Percival Everett is an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and educator. Born in 1956, he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org (opens in a new tab)dornsife.usc.edu (opens in a new tab)

What did Percival Everett study, and where has he taught?

He earned a philosophy degree from the University of Miami and a master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University. He has taught at the University of Kentucky, the University of Notre Dame, the University of California, Riverside, and USC.

Sources: scencyclopedia.org (opens in a new tab)dornsife.usc.edu (opens in a new tab)

How does race and identity shape Percival Everett’s writing?

His fiction challenges pressure on Black writers to produce a single, marketable version of Black life. Through satire and varied forms, he explores identity as complex and resists limiting racial stereotypes.

Source: newyorker.com (opens in a new tab)

Which writers and thinkers influenced Percival Everett?

The New Yorker identifies Wittgenstein, Chester Himes, Bertrand Russell, J. L. Austin, and Robert Coover among his influences. Mark Twain is also a major literary interlocutor; Everett reread Huckleberry Finn fifteen times while writing James.

Source: newyorker.com (opens in a new tab)

What major awards has Percival Everett won?

He won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for James. He has also received the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and the Windham Campbell Prize.

Sources: nationalbook.org (opens in a new tab)pulitzer.org (opens in a new tab)nationalbook.org (opens in a new tab)