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“... No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity ...”

“... wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison, in Percival Everett’s Erasure Race is America’s most enduring fiction. And for all the relieved, Obama-era sighing over America’s new, nominally post-racial century, that fiction can be infuriatingly hard to shake, or look past, or write one’s way ...”

“... Harpers’ of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s runaway bestseller, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, as quoted in Percival Everett’s new novel. We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is a fictional fiction modelled on more than one recent rendering of ghetto life, and has just been made a Book Club Selection on the Kenya Dunston Show (‘Girl, that is some writing,’ Kenya ...”

“... a junior.’ To Toni Morrison, Jim seemed a ‘buffoon’, wearing an ‘ill-made clown suit’.In Percival Everett’s​ retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, the clown suit has been deliberately put on. James begins, as Twain’s novel does, with Huck and Tom contemplating tying Jim to a tree while he sleeps, settling for hanging his ...”