Thelonious "Monk" Ellison writes dense, scholarly novels that publishers reject as not "Black enough," while the bestselling sensation of the season is a first novel built from every ghetto cliché in the warehouse. In disgust — and in need, with his sister dead and his mother sinking into dementia — Monk dashes off a parody under the name Stagg R. Leigh: My Pafology, an eighty-page novel-within-the-novel that the industry embraces as raw truth. Everett's satire of the publishing business and its racial script won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was adapted, two decades on, into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (2023). (For the record: the first edition is the University Press of New England's; the later Hyperion paperback and the 2003 Faber and Faber UK edition are sometimes miscited as the original.)
Author: Percival Everett · Original publisher: University Press of New England (Hanover, New Hampshire), 2001