Percival Everett Books in Order

Craig Suder, a slumping Seattle Mariners third baseman, decides he cannot hit a curveball, keep his life together, or even quite explain himself. Everett turns a sports setup into a strange, funny breakdown story.

Vietnam veteran David Larson drifts into a fading Western town, where grief, work, and an odd local family pull him into a search for a missing boy. A quiet, bleakly funny early novel about damage and survival.

Recently widowed obstetrician John Livesey goes to Oregon to visit family and soon suspects a secret at the center of his son's marriage. What begins as domestic unease turns into a sly, unsettling small-town mystery.

Everett's first story collection gathers spare, often rough-edged pieces set mostly in the contemporary West. These stories watch ordinary people under pressure, and you can already feel his eye for dry humor and sudden violence.

Everett recasts the myth of Jason and Medea, centering Medea as a Black woman whose intelligence, love, and rage drive the story. The result is a lean, unsettling retelling about desire, power, and betrayal.

In a ruined future, Alice Achitophel, an outcast in a dead-end city, finds herself mysteriously pregnant and suddenly valuable to dangerous people. Everett mixes apocalypse, black comedy, and fable into something eerie and hard to predict.

In this playful picture book, three cowboys rope a runaway number one, only to find there are many more where it came from. It is a goofy, clever story about words, numbers, and how slippery simple things can be.

After raiders destroy his home and kidnap his wife, cowardly rancher Curt Marder hires a Black tracker named Bubba and rides west in pursuit. Everett uses the search to savage the myths of the American Western.

This story collection moves through painters' lives, damaged relationships, and the everyday strain of being Black in white spaces. Everett keeps the tone darkly comic, restless, and alert to the moment when ordinary life veers sideways.

Narrated by Dionysos's put-upon companion, this novel reimagines Greek myth as comic, strange, and often brutal. As the god of wine and frenzy moves through the world, old stories turn newly unruly.

A hydrologist heads to the mountains for solitude and fishing, then gets drawn into murder, treaty politics, and a toxic threat to a nearby reservation. It is part mystery, part political thriller, and deeply rooted in place.

Ralph is a silent baby with a staggering mind, a gift for theory, and a habit of writing notes in crayon. When adults discover what he can do, this funny, brainy novel turns into a philosophical kidnapping caper.

Frustrated that the literary world rewards narrow ideas of Blackness, novelist Thelonious Monk Ellison writes a parody of a stereotyped bestseller. Then the parody becomes a sensation, and the joke turns painfully real.

A scheme to turn the Grand Canyon into the ultimate commercial attraction sets off a fight between greed and resistance. This short, sharp satire goes after spectacle, development, and what gets ruined for profit.

Told through letters and documents, this satire follows a madcap effort to produce a history of African American life supposedly backed by Strom Thurmond. Everett and James Kincaid turn the whole project into a farce about power, race, and bad faith.

College professor Ted Street dies in a gruesome accident, then sits up in his coffin at the funeral. His impossible return sparks a media circus, religious panic, and a darkly comic search for what being alive now means.

A mischievous collection of stories about race, class, desire, and storytelling itself. Some pieces feel realistic, some surreal, but almost all of them twist expectations just when you think you know where Everett is headed.

This early poetry collection moves from myth and fable into the body, then onward to logic and philosophy. Everett uses tight, experimental poems to test how sound, sense, and image rub against one another.

Wyoming horse trainer John Hunt wants a quiet life, but violence keeps closing in around his ranch. Everett builds a spare, tense novel about friendship, masculinity, and the cost of looking away.

After his daughter's death, writer Ishmael Kidder abducts the man he believes is responsible and holds him in a remote cabin. The novel is part revenge tale, part shattered confession, and never lets its moral ground stay steady.

Named Not Sidney Poitier, a wealthy orphan moves through a world that keeps misreading him. Everett spins the setup into a deadpan comic odyssey about race, class, names, and the absurd rules of American life.

Deputy sheriff Ogden Walker investigates a set of baffling cases in and around a small New Mexico town. Each mystery seems to open into something stranger, until the book starts unsettling your trust in the story itself.

These poems worry at the link between words and meaning, then enjoy breaking it. The collection is playful, meditative, and full of shifts in sound, logic, and perspective.

A man visits his aging father in a nursing home and finds himself pulled into a looping story that may be his father's, his own, or both. Everett turns grief and family strain into a slippery, self-questioning novel.

Retired professor Lewis Martin finds the body of his friend Martin Aguilera in a cabin, only for it to vanish when he returns with the sheriff. What follows is a lean Southwestern mystery full of disappearance, doubt, and mounting danger.

This edition presents Thomas Jefferson's stripped-down gospel narrative, assembled by removing miracles and focusing on Jesus's moral teachings. Everett contributes the introduction, framing the book as a revealing act of belief, doubt, and selection.

Set largely in Wyoming and the wider West, these linked stories follow ranchers, drifters, families, and searchers through grief, weather, and sudden grace. Everett keeps the language spare while letting the uncanny slip quietly into view.

This experimental volume is built from fake reviews, fragments, letters, and scholarly jokes circling an almost impossible book called Parts of Brain. It is Everett at his most self-conscious, playful, and determined to keep readers off balance.

In this poetry collection, Everett tests the border between meaning and nonsense with sharp, deceptively simple lines. The poems feel thoughtful, sly, and more interested in asking questions than settling them.

Painter Kevin Pace carries several secrets at once: a hidden canvas, an affair in Paris, and a memory from a dangerous trip to El Salvador. Everett braids art, marriage, friendship, and guilt into a quiet, suspenseful novel.

This slim volume pairs two brief works, one grounded in family life and unease, the other gleefully metafictional. Even in miniature, Everett makes narrative feel unstable, funny, and slightly dangerous.

Framed as a mock nineteenth-century training manual for slaveholders, this brief, brutal poetry book imitates the language of instruction, profit, and punishment. Everett uses the form to expose the cold mechanics of slavery without softening any of it.

A college professor learns his daughter is gravely ill and begins to unravel under the weight of grief and uncertainty. Everett turns a family crisis into a tense, disorienting novel about love and narrative itself.

A string of bizarre murders in Money, Mississippi draws investigators into a case haunted by the legacy of lynching and the murder of Emmett Till. It is funny, furious, and impossible to read as just a mystery.

Mathematician Wala Kitu is hired by a billionaire villain obsessed with nothing, literally, and soon ends up in a comic caper aimed at Fort Knox. Everett mixes Bond parody, philosophy, and heist energy with perfect straight-face timing.

Everett retells Huckleberry Finn from James's point of view, giving Jim a private life, a sharp mind, and far more agency than the old novel allowed. The familiar journey becomes tense, funny, and devastatingly new.

Inspired by Chopin's preludes and jazz phrasing, these experimental sonnets play with tone, music, and formal restraint. Everett lets the poems sound precise and loose at once, as if the page were listening as much as speaking.