Conversations with Percival Everett
5/5
()
About this ebook
Interviews collected in this volume—several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time—display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work being described as “characteristically uncharacteristic.” At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about “Jim Crow,” a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.
Related to Conversations with Percival Everett
Related ebooks
Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConversations with George Saunders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Desert Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Operation Wandering Soul: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaving the Atocha Station Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Trees: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Busted in New York and Other Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrenchblight: Innocence and Absolution Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I Know What's Best for You Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCane Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe End of Vandalism: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBest European Fiction 2010 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Other Name: Septology I-II Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Promise of Rest Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5City of Margins: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Moment in the Sun Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Best American Short Stories 2018 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of the Rabbit Hutch Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI is Another: Septology III-V Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
General Fiction For You
The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The City of Dreaming Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unhoneymooners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Fine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Ends with Us: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King James Version of the Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beartown: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Recital of the Dark Verses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Good and Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nettle & Bone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shantaram: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Conversations with Percival Everett
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good read into the insight of a private average joe author.
Book preview
Conversations with Percival Everett - Joe Weixlmann
On Writing: Visiting Author Brings a Love of Craft to Classroom
Fred Kirsch / 1994
From The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), 26 February 1994, B1. Copyright © 2012. The Virginian-Pilot. Reprinted with permission.
They’d been reading his short stories and novels for weeks, but they didn’t quite know what to expect when Percival Everett came to Virginia Wesleyan College.
They thought he’d be, well, older. And serious. His writing was so spare and lean and to the point.
And probably a white guy. They were white, those doctors and hunters and guys hanging around Carlton’s garage and that huge three-hundred-pound woman he wrote about, weren’t they?
But when Everett arrived on campus to spend two weeks as a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest writing fellow, students discovered you can’t judge a book by its cover. Or a writer by his subjects.
Everett turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old black man who not only, according to one student, is an awesome writer
but also a guy who talked their language. A guy who knew all about staring at blank computer screens.
To be able to actually sit down and talk to an author you’ve been reading is just an incredible opportunity,
said Melody Budzina, a sophomore who sat in on one of the many classes Everett spoke to.
You get so much more out of something like this. Even though we’re students, he said a lot of things we could identify with.
He should have.
Everett wasn’t much older than the two dozen students sitting in front of him on a recent morning in an English 112 class when he wrote his first novel, Suder, about a baseball player who falls into a horrendous slump that brings on a constellation of off-field problems.
It was published when he was twenty-four. Now he’s at work on his sixth and seventh novels, writing short stories in between.
Writing is more than putting words on paper. It’s a way of life,
Everett says.
Everett will return to Virginia Wesleyan in the fall as part of the national Writing Fellows Program, whose purpose is to stimulate greater appreciation for the written word on campuses.
Virginia Wesleyan is one of eighteen colleges selected this year (there will be sixty over the next four years) for the program, which is administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and is the largest of its kind in the country.
If you have to write and you don’t, you’re going to be miserable,
he tells the students. You’ve got to write. That’s the way it was for me. If it’s in you, let it out. But keep the day job.
By day, Everett, a lean, immaculate man, is a professor of creative writing at the University of California–Riverside. But by night and at heart, he’s a writer. A writer’s writer.
You have to love the craft first
is one of the messages he brought to a class of students the other day. "The work is more important than you. And if it’s good it will last a lot longer. It has the potential to endure. You