Percival Everett has one of the best poker faces in contemporary American literature. The author of twenty-two novels, he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits. “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”). Everett, sixty-four, is so consistently surprising that his agent once begged him to try repeating himself—advice he’s studiously ignored. “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. “I write fiction.”
