Erasure: A Novel

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days."

Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, & he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal & professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, & quietly devastating novel.

PERCIVAL EVERETT is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California & the author of over thirty books, including The Trees, Telephone, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, & Erasure.