“We on that again.” “I wronged that little pickaninny. The story ends with the flag’s removal from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. Later, he buys a used truck with a Confederate-flag decal, sparking a trend that turns the hateful symbol into an emblem of Black pride.

In his short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” from 1996, a Black guitarist playing at a joint near the University of South Carolina is asked by a group of white fraternity brothers to sing “Dixie.” He obliges with a rendition so genuine that the secessionist anthem becomes his own, shaming the pranksters and eliciting an ovation. “I write fiction.”īeneath his work’s ever-changing surface lies an obsession with the instability of meaning, and with unpredictable shifts of identity. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly,” he said earlier this year. Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself-advice he’s studiously ignored. “If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game,” he once said of his books, which range from elliptical thriller to genre-shattering farce their narrators include a vengeful romance novelist (“ The Water Cure”), a hyperliterate baby (“ Glyph”), and a suicidal English professor risen from the dead (“ American Desert”). The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits.

Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature.

Erasure by percival everett