Erasure

A Novel

De: Percival Everett

Narrado por: Sean Crisden

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now as the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross.

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 of We'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 tragedies—his 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 for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

©2001 Percival Everett (P)2023 Tantor

Most Unusual

He won with the genre he hated most. As an 81 year old white woman, even I know who Stagger Lee was. The author is so much smarter than on ordinary person. I only understood his conversations.

did the movie first, then the book

liked the humor, the irony, and the fact that the book helped me get a little more invested in the characters.

A Good Read

This is a story about a black man who somehow gets caught up in the current zeitgeist of what being “black” means in America.

I fine book, but I was a little disappointed

I suppose any book that came after James, by the same author, would’ve been a letdown as James was so incredibly good. But I was put off by the sections about Go(gh) and the sections that used hyper intellectual language. The first was painful and the second was boring.

so interestingly different

hated the German language switch but it made points.. weird but interesting writing style