I Am Not Sidney Poitier

(Paperback)

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Description

The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier's mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation. Percival Everett's novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn't know what to do with him. This novel ranks as one of the greatest achievements of Percival Everett, an overlooked master of American storytelling.

Reviews

A hilarious and heart-breaking story of class and race * The White Review *
The most sidesplitting dialogue this side of Catch-22 . . . Not only is the novel smart and without a trace of pretentiousness, it shows Everett as a novelist at the height of his narrative and satirical powers * Publishers Weekly *
[A] hilarious strut through the badlands of race and class * NPR *
Percival Everett adds another unique and entertaining new novel to his collection of fiction with I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Readers can expect the tongue-in-cheek writing style and off-the-wall energy characteristic of Everett . . . Everett succeeds in presenting a comical yet thought-provoking novel that questions the line separating reality from fiction * Callaloo *

Author Bio

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees and Dr. No. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.