The kernel of it was a song: Lyle Lovett, the country singer, covered the traditional song Ain’t No More Cane and coupled it with another song called Rise Up.

I completed the manuscript right before Covid started – I’d been working on it for a year – but it was something that had been on my mind all the time. What led you to write a novel about lynching? He spoke from Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California. His new book, The Trees, is a twisted detective novel centred on a spate of grisly, seemingly supernatural murders of white people in modern-day Mississippi. The New Yorker has called Everett “cool, analytic and resolutely idiosyncratic… he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits”.

This first monograph constitutes a tribute worthy of Everett’s remarkable achievement.P ercival Everett, 65, is the author of 21 novels, including Glyph, a satire on literary theory, Telephone, which was published simultaneously in three different versions, and Erasure, about a black author who, angered by expectations of what African American fiction ought to look like, adopts a pseudonym to write a parodically gritty (and wildly successful) novel called My Pafology. It convincingly foregrounds Menippean satire as the core subversive mode at the heart of Everett’s project of challenging all linguistic, generic, and ideological assumptions. Taking his cue from Everett’s work Maus destabilizes preconceived ideas to promote genuine reflection.” - Anne-Laure Tissut, Rouen University “Knowledgeable, accessible, and synthetic, Jesting in Earnest is a perfect introduction to Percival Everett’s complex, motley fiction. In specifying Everett as a Menippean satirist, Maus lays an astute and essential foundation for the growing field of study of this important novelist’s work.” - Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University “From the very specific and relevant point of view of Menippean satire, Derek Maus offers a thorough exegesis of Everett’s oeuvre. This is no small task: While relieving the reader in this way, he also does full justice to the intricate theoretical complexities rooted in Everett’s sophisticated training in philosophy.” – Robert Butler, _African American Review_ 53.4 (Winter 2020) “Jesting in Earnest establishes a critical vocabulary that Everett scholars will find invaluable. Moreover, the book is written in a fluent style which is noteworthy for its clarity and freedom from critical jargon. Even though Maus engages an unusual number of Everett’s novels and stories, he probes them in finely nuanced detail. The book is meticulously well researched in ways that are consistently fair and balanced. “Among Jesting in Earnest’ s many strengths is its thorough mastery of the Everett canon and the extensive critical response to it.

American desert percival everett