Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFinalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for FictionA man visits his ageing father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical enquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book.

[A] stark, shattering novel… This meta-fiction is deeply moving., [Percival Everett is] so humanely adept at getting to the heart of the human condition. . . . Everett has created much more than an exercise in unreliable narration, an exploration of the nature of language and the rationales we create to keep ourselves going as we grow old. By the conclusion, every sentence, indeed every word, has come to seem like a valuable key, not just to this puzzle of a novel, but to the meaning of existence., A potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children., Within [a] narrative labyrinth, the novel is much more than an academic exercise . . . as it searches for the possibility of meaning in life as well as narrative and meditates on the process of aging and the inevitability of death, The heart of storytelling and the heart of a complicated man beat together in this extraordinary meditation on love, language, and the irrevocable action of time. Who tells whose story when and why and how do we know when it's over? For Everett, it's never over, and it's never enough, and it's the very best thing we've got. A novel of surpassing intelligence, grief, and tenderness.

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees and Dr. No. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.