English: TomorrowTalks with Percival Everett: The Trees

00:00 Introduction 02:26 Discussion with Ayanna Thompson 27:58 Student Question: Courtney Caputo 31:09 Student Question: JP Hanson 35:37 Student Question: Erin Slutzky 37:12 Student Question: Evan Hofer 40:27 Audience Questions

Arizona State University welcomed Booker Prize finalist Percival Everett as a guest in its TomorrowTalks series. Everett discussed his novels "The Trees" (2021) and "Dr. No" (2022) on Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022 at 6 p.m. The conversation was facilitated by ASU literary scholar Ayanna Thompson, a Regents Professor of English and founding director of the RaceB4Race Initiative in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

About the books Provocative and page-turning, "The Trees" takes direct aim at racism, police violence, and the painful legacy of lynching in the United States. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi to investigate a series of brutal murders, they find at each crime scene an unexpected second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. After meeting resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk, the MBI detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, they seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. "The Trees" was a finalist for the 2022 Booker Prize.

The protagonist of Everett’s puckish new novel, "Dr. No," is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks. "Dr. No" is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers.

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections. Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Dos Passos Prize, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, The 2010 Believer Book Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, a Creative Capital Award, BS the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.