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Erasure

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Sean Crisden
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Summary

Erasure is Percival Everett's hilarious satire about race and publishing, now an Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross.

'Hilarious . . . Everett is a first-rate word-wrangler.' – Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison's once-acclaimed writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers. 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, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off an outlandish novel full of stereotypes. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is, and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing.

How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical and quietly devastating novel.

'Sublime . . . brilliant, uproarious . . . A wise novel about how we live.' – Brandon Taylor, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Real Life

'Seminal doesn't even come close. This novel is Everett at his finest, full of trademark protest, humanity and incisive humour, all wrapped up in one hell of a story.' – Courttia Newland, author of
A River Called Time

©2021 Percival Everett (P)2023 Recorded Books
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Haven't enjoyed a book this much in some time

Beautiful, funny and very sad. A good, sad look a what racism does to artists. Excellent narration.

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What a fantastic read!

I listened to it every moment I could. I would love to see the film. Deserved all the awards it won.

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I don't usually like novels that mess around with form

However, this is brilliant. We follow Monk through a crazy time in his life by reading his notebook and journal. We are also privvie to his latest literary offering.

Here, Everett uses humour to mercilessly critique the presence of institutional racism mainly in the publishing industry, but elsewhere, too. He does this by publishing the racism to extreme to see where it might land.

The greatest compliment I can give this book is that one day, I would like to write something similar around disability.

There is also a sweet subplot about how to grow old gracefully.

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Brilliant book, excellently read

A brilliant book and so well read. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. Can’t wait to discover more of Everett’s work.

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Brilliant

Loved the film American Fiction and the book is even better. Extremely well read. Thoroughly recommend

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Percival Everett 🫶

Great performance and an amazing chance to juxtapose the original text with the movie adaptation. I now love both!

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An enjoyable read with a very serious message

This book conveyed issues of race, stereotyping and the pressures brought to bear by a dominant cultural narrative bundled together in a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining and at times, very funny read.

I highly recommend this

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Brilliant narrator; story was tough to decipher at times

There is no question that Everett is a great writer, but not so sure he is writing to communicate with me. The novella in the novel was rather jarring, although that was the point. The lines of Latin were annoying, given I don’t know it and with an audio book it is tough to look up as you don’t have the spelling. Didn’t always get the short dialogues between two historical figures, either. Nonetheless, the narrator was brilliant across all these characters.

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Deleted at Chapter 2

I couldn’t get through the babble that was chapter 2, sorry. I tried. Maybe this is better as a book than an audio book…

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1 person found this helpful