Erasure

“Erasure
demonstrates the folly of racial assumptions in America. It also shows how our culture alters its past—how we repudiate our own histories. We’re too quick to assume and we’re too quick to forget. Everett is a novelist we should definitely keep an eye on.”

—
Playboy

“Oases in what too often feels a dreary desert of literary mediocrity, Everett’s books … are unfailingly intelligent and funny, formally bold and intellectually ambitious…. [The novel-within-the-novel] is a truly vile and very, very funny piece of writing, mocking the clichés of ghetto genre-writing with all possible viciousness.”

—
L.A. Weekly

“A tour de force for Everett, who cheerily blasts apart our notions of political/racial correctness in a story that is sharp-edged yet lyrically tender-hearted. It’s a brilliant book that can only benefit from word of mouth and is virtually guaranteed to be even better than you’ve heard it is.”

—
The State
(Columbia, SC)

“Short, tight, and nasty, [the novel-within-the-novel is] as fast and funny as a modern-day
Candide.?”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“The sharp satire on American publishers and American readers that Everett puts forward is delicious, though it won’t win him many friends among the sentimental educated class who want to read something serious about black inner-city life without disturbing any of their stereotypes.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Erasure
deserves the attention of anyone—black or white—interested in sophisticated fiction that subtly questions the phrase ‘black and white.’”

—Tom LeClair,
Book Magazine

“
Erasure
is probably Everett’s most wryly humorous and disturbingly semiautobiographical and metafictional novel.”

—
African American 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.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A scathingly funny look at racism and the book business: editors, publishers, readers, and writers alike.”

—Vanessa Bush,
Booklist

“More genuine and tender than much of Everett’s previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Everett makes good use of his literary antecedents, most notably Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, reworking their themes in intriguing ways. This is an important novel from a well-established American author.”

—
Library Journal

“Erasure
is just that—a revelation, the heart and mind of a writer laid bare. Percival Everett has accomplished that rare thing, a novel at once emotionally moving and outrageously satirical. Shocking, tender, brainy, honest.”

—Josephine Humphreys

“The prospect of reading anything from Percival Everett’s pen is thrilling. He is a total original, someone whose work one reads with that marvelous sense of familiar discovery which we get from reading only the best writers.
Erasure
is no exception. What a great pleasurable ride, what a read!”

—Richard Bausch

“Why do I love Percival Everett’s new novel,
Erasure?
Because, like all of his fiction, it is audacious. Its audaciousness consists not only of a wildly engaging story, but of describing the most indispensable worst and best of people. In plot, dialogue, sheer inventiveness, Everett is stupendously one of our least compromised writers. The construction of this novel is genius;
Erasure
refracts the American experience, then powerfully re-shapes it. Thelonious Ellison—a writer—is one of the edgiest, most savvy, indelible characters I’ve encountered in decades!”

—Howard Norman

“The most refreshingly alive novel I’ve read in a long time. It’s funny and serious and sad and strong and courageous…. This one will last. And that is what counts.”

—Clarence Major

“A parody within a parody, intricately cross-hatched as a double-crostic,
Erasure
may be the most irreverent take on matters racial since—well, since nothing. It’s what Ellison’s
Invisible Man
would look like if he crawled out of his dark hole and said, ‘Yo mamma.’”

—Lisa Zeidner

“The anger and brilliance of Percival Everett’s
Erasure
puts you in mind of
Invisible Man,
but the satirical wit is all Everett’s own. Half the time I wanted to laugh until I cried and the other half I wanted to fly into a righteous rage and go and start … never mind.”

—Madison Smartt Bell

Assumption

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

The Water Cure

Wounded

American Desert

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond,
As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid

Damned If I Do

Erasure

Grand Canyon, Inc.

Glyph

Frenzy

Watershed

Big Picture

The Body of Martin Aguilera

God’s Country

For Her Dark Skin

Zulus

The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

Cutting Lisa

Walk Me to the Distance

Suder

The One That Got Away

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2001 by Percival Everett

This publication is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, MN 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-599-9

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-039-0

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930487

Cover design: Kapo Ng @ A-Men Project

I could never tell a lie that anybody would doubt,
nor a truth that anybody would believe.
—Mark Twain,
Following the Equator

My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.

I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated
summa cum laude
from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south. My family owned a bungalow near Annapolis. My grandfather was a doctor. My father was a doctor. My brother and sister were doctors.