Watershed

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION Featured in the New York Times! Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a comic tour de force from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of James and Erasure.<BR><BR>The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier's mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation.<BR><BR>Percival Everett's novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn't know what to do with him.<BR><BR>'American literature's philosopher king - and its sharpest satirist' - The New Yorker<BR><BR>Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett's The Trees is a powerful satire of revenge and racial justice in America.<BR><BR>'Page-turning comic horror' - The Guardian<BR>'Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park' - The Daily Telegraph<BR>'Hilarious and horrifying' - The New Yorker<BR><BR>When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive. They're greeted with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk.<BR><BR>This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier.<BR><BR>As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America's violent past . . . <BR><BR>Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning and Booker prize-shortlisted novel James.

"Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." -Wall Street Journal<BR><BR>* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction *<BR><BR>A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging 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?<BR><BR>Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?<BR><BR>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 inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.