Percival Everett

Just about all you can find out about Percival Everett—the author of Assumption, our book for August—on the internet is pretty much what you can get from reading the back of your book.  He was born in 1956, graduated from Brown University, has had more than 20 books, teaches at the University of Southern California, and is married to another writer, Danzy Senna.

Two of his novels are available at the San Leandro Library:

Wounded (2008), about an upper-middle-class black man, John Hunt, who has attended a private prep school and studied art at Berkeley, who chucked it all to become a horse trainer in Wyoming because of the sheer beauty of the country. John's life has reached a kind of equilibrium, when a young man who has worked for him occasionally as a ranch hand is murdered in an apparent homophobic hate crime.

Erasure (2002).  Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is an academic and a writer of very intellectual experimental novels. He has simultaneously been told that his novels are not marketable because they don't tap into the "black experience" and found one his novels (if I recall correctly, based on themes of ancient Persian mythology) filed in the "African American Literature" section of the local big-box book store, because if you're an African American writer, that's where your books go, no matter what they are about. Monk has had to go back home to the suburban DC area  (in the heat of summer) because of a family crisis, which unravels into a series of cascading crises. At the same time, the hottest best-seller that summer is a book called We's Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a college-educated middle-class writer like himself, a book that offends Monk on multiple levels. In response (and under the influence, if I recall correctly), Monk writes his own "blaxploitation" novel, My Pafology, even more offensive and over-the-top than the other book. He puts it on the market under a pseudonym, and it becomes a runaway best seller.

Here is a brief clip from an interview with Percival Everett: