Eight new essays on Everett’s work are slated for release within days from Xavier Review Press in Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise, a new collection from editors Keith Mitchell and Robin Vander, whose editorial collaboration last year brought us Perspectives on Percival Everett (UP of Mississippi). The new tome also features a short essay by Everett about his visual art, along with reproductions of several of his paintings.

The book opens with a fine piece by the editors that not only introduces the essays which follow but effectively positions Everett as an innovative writer whose work eludes easy classification and challenges prevailing assumptions about what art produced by African Americans is, or should be. Other contributions to this wide-ranging collection include Sylvie Bauer writing on Zulus, Amee Carmines on Frenzy, Keith Mitchell on Levinasian ethics in God’s Country, Beauty Bragg on Everett and Kincaid’s History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond, Timothy Mark Robinson on Glyph as a neo-slave narrative, Sha-shonda Porter on erasure, and S. Isabel Geathers on Everett’s important, if underappreciated, poetry collection Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise deserves the attention of every scholar and true fan of Everett’s œuvre. (JW)