This is exemplified in the excerpt from My Pafology. Here Everett suggests that books by authors of colour are categorised and defined by race.īut, what makes Erasure such a success, is Everett’s excellently executed satire.

For example, although Monk’s book The Persians is about Greek Mythology, it is placed in the African-American section of the bookstore. Another remarkable point Everett makes in Erasure relates to how race operates in the publishing industry. Here Everett describes Monk in a way that conforms with societal expectations of blackness. Everett cleverly makes this point when Monk introduces himself as an individual with ‘dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose’ whose ‘ancestors were slaves’. However, any descriptions of race must ‘conform to expectations of race and its workings’. As Taylor points out in the foreword, Erasure highlights how readers do not like racial ambiguity they ‘want to know if a character is black’. Monk’s novel goes on to receive a six-figure movie deal, putting him in a moral conundrum.Įverett’s novel is deeply thought-provoking. After picking up a copy of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller We Lives in Da Ghetto, a supposedly ‘authentic’ depiction of the ‘African-American experience’, Monk is inspired to write a hilariously absurd parody entitled My Pafology. Reviewers and publishers alike are critiquing The Persians for having ‘little to do with the black experience’. Sales of Monk’s latest novel, The Persians, are at an all-time low. Erasure follows Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, a self-proclaimed ‘writer of fiction a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker’. First published in 2001, Erasure by American writer and Professor of English Percival Everett, is being reissued in August with a new foreword by Brandon Taylor, Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life.

Erasure by Percival Everett