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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King has won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature!!!  Buy now
Book Title

Half an Inch of Water

Subtitle
Stories
Author 1
Percival Everett
Body
Percival Everett’s long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004’s Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a beloved dog that had died years before.
 
For the plainspoken men and women of these stories—fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians—small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Percival Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-719-1
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
176
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A new collection of stories set in the West from “one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers” (NPR)

About the Author

Percival  Everett
Credit: Michael Avedon
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books, most recently JamesDr. No, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize; and Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
More by author

Praise

  • Named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR, Electric Literature, Flavorwire, Kansas City Star, and Minnesota Public Radio
     
  • “Agile. . . . Everett’s spare prose both anchors the supernatural flourishes and binds the collection together, as constant as the landscape.”The New Yorker
  • Half an Inch of Water plunges into the contemporary American West with quiet confidence and a shimmer of magic.”Los Angeles Times
  • “Everett displays a intellectual dexterity and formal versatility that few contemporary American writers can match.”Chicago Tribune
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