Jesting in Earnest

"As the first single-authored critical work published on Percival Everett, Derek C. Maus's Jesting in Earnest is a close-reading tour-de-force of one of the most iconoclastic and allusive of all contemporary American writers. Spanning the entirety of Everett's impressive literary career, Maus's reading of Everett's work through the lens of Menippean satire significantly expands the growing critical conversation about Everett's life and art."—Keith B. Mitchell, University of Massachusetts Lowell

"From the very specific and relevant point of view of Menippean satire, Derek Maus offers a thorough exegesis of Everett's œuvre grounded in a critical review of Everett studies. Taking his cue from Everett's work Maus destabilizes preconceived ideas to promote genuine reflection."—Anne-Laure Tissut, Rouen University

"The first monograph devoted to the work of Percival Everett, Jesting in Earnest effectively categorizes Everett's eclectic output through the lens of Menippean satire. Maus demonstrates that even Everett's more earnest and stylistically realist works, such as his novels set in the American West, are jesting in mode—satirical, paradoxical, and as skeptical of assertions of fixity and certainty as his metafiction."—Michael K. Johnson, author of Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos

"Jesting in Earnest establishes a critical vocabulary that Everett scholars will find invaluable. In specifying Everett as a Menippean satirist, Maus lays an astute and essential foundation for the growing field of study of this important novelist's work."—Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University

"Knowledgeable, accessible, and synthetic, Derek C. Maus's Jesting in Earnest is a perfect introduction to Percival Everett's complex, motley fiction. It convincingly foregrounds Menippean satire as the core subversive mode at the heart of Everett's project of challenging all linguistic, generic, and ideological assumptions. This first monograph constitutes a tribute worthy of Everett's remarkable achievement."—Michel Feith, University of Nantes

"Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire does a remarkable job of productively coping with this problem [of classifying Percival Everett's work] by reading Everett's fiction in terms of 'an interpretive framework' for examining Everett's 'thirty-volume megawork."—African American Review