Synopsis
‘American literature’s philosopher king – and its sharpest satirist’ – The New Yorker
Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a slump. His batting average is shocking, his marriage somehow worse, and he secretly fears he’s inherited his mother’s insanity. Ordered to take a midseason rest, Suder instead takes his LP of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” and flees.
A dazzling tale of madness, confinement and the need for escape, Suder introduced Percival Everett to the world as a writer already fully capable of conjuring whole lives and worlds on the page.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.
Details
29 May 2025
9781035077304Reviews
A mad work of comic genius, combining symbols and myths from ancients and moderns, white culture and black, juxtaposing heartbreaks with farce to make up a narrative that has never, never been told before
[A] marvellous first novel
Very funny – sometimes excruciatingly so
Who could meld baseball and jazz with the most wistful male myth of all – the Icarus myth –remembering that Daedalus really did do it: He flew
