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Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children
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The inspirations behind my Booker-shortlisted book
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
The book I return to time and time again
Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. I love the way Butler creates the history of the family seemingly without effort and I love the humour.
The book I can't get out of my head
There are too many to single out just one.
The book that changed the way I think about the world
Chester Himes's novel Third Generation made me consider the politics of skin colour. I could see my own mother in the mother of the character and so formed a better understanding of people in general.
The book that changed the way I think about the novel
Sterne's Tristram Shandy taught me the importance of play as an avenue to meaning. Also, I learned that important truths don't need and often don't come italicised or with brassy accompaniment.
The book that ...
Jabari Asim is a writer and multidisciplinary artist, who has been described as one of the most influential African American literary critics of his generation. Asim is the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice ... (more)
Paul Beatty is the author of four novels—Slumberland, Tuff, The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout (winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Man Booker Prize)—and two books of poetry: Big ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Dr. No
Try:
The Sellout
by Paul Beatty
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