God’s Country
$17.00
by Percival Everett
introduction by Madison Smartt Bell
“Mr. Everett is successful combining heart with rage. . . . The novel sears.” ―David Bowman, The New York Times Book Review
This ‘comic and fierce’ novel spoofs the classic Western format with the dark, incisive humor we’ve come to expect from its acclaimed author.
One of the earliest works anchoring Percival Everett’s illustrious career, God’s Country is by turns funny, shocking, and devastating. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. Unfortunately, he’s a coward. When he sees a band of “Injun impersonators” pillaging his home, he has “half a mind to ride down that hill and say somethin’, but it was just half a mind after all.” It’s 1871, and he’s lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder enlists the help of the best tracker in the West: a Black man named Bubba.
With an introduction from renowned novelist Madison Smartt Bell, this is the perfect edition to add to your growing Percival Everett collection. As NPR’s Michael Schaub noted, “It’s impossible to predict what the next Everett book will bring, but it’s always a safe bet that it’s going to be great.”
Paperback | 232 pages | Beacon Press | 2024
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children
