Damned If I Do

by Percival Everett

Overview

Damned If I Do is an exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure

People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid.

A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem.

Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974114
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	224,713
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Percival Everett is the author of more than twenty books. He is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives outside Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

It's hard to pigeonhole Percival Everett. Working between the traditions of the academy and the African American tall tale, he writes with a sharp satirical voice.” —Playboy

“I think Percival Everett is a genius. He's a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him.” —Terry McMillan

From the Publisher

Novelist and satirist Everett (Erasure; A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond) gives his own particular spin to tales of fly-fishing and the American South and West in his second short story collection. In "Alluvial Deposits," a hydrologist encounters a Colorado woman who refuses to give him permission to inspect an aquifer on her land. After she tells him off, "she slam[s] the door and manage[s] to squeeze the word nigger through the last, skinniest gap." Racial conflict filters into most of the 12 stories, which are told with a raw simplicity that stands in bracing contrast to forays into the surreal. In "Epigenesis," a fly-fisherman catches a three-and-a-half-foot-long talking trout, which gives him advice that helps save his marriage. As he has in previous works, Everett strives to demythologize the American South. In one of the strongest stories, "The Appropriation of Cultures," a young, Ivy league-educated black guitarist living in South Carolina buys a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag sticker on it. As he drives the truck around town, he's threatened by hostile white Southerners, but manages to start a revolution of sorts as an increasing number of black Southerners co-opt the flag and fly it as their own. Clever and thought- provoking, this is a memorable collection. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Following on the heels of critical success for such books as Erasure, Glyph, and Watershed, Everett does not disappoint in his latest compendium of a dozen dazzling short stories. "Epigenesis," which features a talking fish, embodies the essence of the entire collection, its disarmingly smooth cadence and simple realism abruptly turning to the fantastic and then back again, like a dream. Everett crowds his writing with subtle imagery and characters: the mental patient describing the chaotic scene of his escape to a blind man in "House," a man called Chicken Lady in "True Romance," the chorus of voices begging to be healed in "The Fix," holding a flashlight in the trailer of a terrified horse in "Afraid of the Dark," and Daniel, a black man, driving a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag in "The Appropriation of Cultures." Whether exploring identity, loss, or the implanted prejudice at America's core, this collection offers a fresh and often hilarious perspective on the ways we see-and are blind to-the world. Highly recommended.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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