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#105 š Endings: the Good, the Bad, the Insanely Great
Manage episode 500681868 series 3683939
About The Book:
Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow areaāthe geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyonāhe is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.
After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughterās slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket heās ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.
A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.
About the Author:
Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everettās. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a childrenās story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett āone of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.ā And according to The Boston Globe, āHeās literatureās NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.ā
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everettās writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991.
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