Erasure: A Novel [Paperback]

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback

Thelonious Monk Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been critically acclaimed. He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success ofWe's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedieshis aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend forMy Pafologyto be published, let alone taken seriously, but it isunder the pseudonym Stagg R. Leighand soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

Percival Everettis Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of seventeen novels, includingI Am Not Sidney Poitier,The Water Cure,Wounded, andGlyph.

Erasure is as watertight and hilarious a satire as, say, [Evelyn Waugh's]Scoop. . . [Everett] is a first-rate word wrangler. Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

With equal measures of sympathy and satire, [Erasure] craftily addresses the highly charged issue of being black enough' in America. Jenifer Berman, The New York Times Book Review

An over-the-top masterpiece. . . . Percival's talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness. Publisherl³|