Percival Everett's Erasure

During my undergrad and grad programs, a staple of nearly every literature class I took was Percival Everett's novel Erasure. I must have read this book 3 times in 3 different classes. Which is a testament to why I still found it worthy to put on my website.

The genius of Everett (even for a post-modernist) is his ability to be inventive, satirical, political and pithy all in one novel. The plight of the central character, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, is a comic, depressing and illuminating critique of race relations within American culture. Not to mention it makes a mockery of literary snobbery and publishing in general.

From the bastardized remake of Wright's Native Son (here retitled as My Pafology) to white, academic culture claiming Ellison's joke of a plagiarized novel as "real" to the African-American experience, Erasure is a comical, witty and startling look at where we are as a culture and how far we truly have to go in terms of racial understanding.