Keynote
A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising
Book Title
Dr. No
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- Winner of the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2022
Named a Best Book of 2022 by NPR, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Chicago Public Library
Body
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel 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.
With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”
Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.
With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”
Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.
List Price
$17.00
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About the Author
Credit: Michael Avedon
Praise
- “Everett is a true American genius, a master artist. . . . As off-kilter as ever, Dr. No is Percival Everett at his most artfully absurd and ironic, and it might be just the thing to finally propel this star into the literary ether.”—Carole V. Bell, Oprah Daily
- “[Dr. No is] sharp-witted satire about racism, violence and academia – and it proves why Everett is one of the most unpredictable and original novelists working today.”—Michael Schaub, NPR
- “The preeminent satirist delivers a deadpan hilarious send up of poisonous contemporary racism and the international espionage genre. . . . It’s absurd and utterly brilliant.”—Oprah Daily, “Best Books of Fall”
- “If the unexpected always happens in Everett’s individual novels, the variety across the work also astonishes.”—Asali Solomon, The Washington Post
