Now with a brilliant new package, a re-issue of the sophomore novel by Percival Everett, New York Times bestselling author of National Book Award winner James.
Haunting, provocative and bleakly funny, Walk Me to the Distance is Percival Everett’s brilliant reexamination of the Western, and a laconic tragicomedy about what it takes to survive in the last days of a bygone big-sky country.
In self-imposed exile after returning home from the war in Vietnam, David Larson meanders into the barren town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, where a local widow takes him under her wing. After making a sort of home among the town’s hardscrabble locals, David grudgingly adopts a young Vietnamese girl abandoned along the highway. This sets in motion a number of tragic turns as Western mythos and frontier justice clash against the tides of a changing world.
First published in 1985 by Clarion Books, Walk Me to the Distance was the sophomore novel of an iconic American voice. Over the course of his five decade career, Everett has written over twenty five books and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize (for 2020’s Telephone), twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the recipient of the 2024 National Book Award for the “genius” (The Atlantic) James, a brilliantly imagined retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. James was a #1 New York Times bestseller and is being developed into film by Stephen Spielberg.
PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
View titles by Percival Everett
Praise for Percival Everett and Walk Me to the Distance
“Everett’s story has violence and pathos. . . . Unforgettable.” —People
“Everett manages to tell a great deal about one man’s moral dilemma and cluttered path to repatriation. The note of hope on which this moving story ends, though tentative, is fully deserved.” —Publishers Weekly
“God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics.” —The Wall Street Journal
“[Everett is a] prolific genius. . . . A literary jukebox.” —Elle
“Percival Everett [is] our current Great American Novelist. . . . Everett is one of the most, if not the most, interesting writers working today.” —Chicago Tribune
“If the unexpected always happens in Everett’s individual novels, the variety across the work also astonishes.” —The Washington Post
“Percival Everett is a giant of American letters.” —Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“One of our culture’s preeminent novelists.” —Los Angeles Times
“Percival Everett is an audacious, beguiling American master, whose wild trajectory has reached astonishing highs in the past decade.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
“[Everett] is a first-rate word wrangler.” —The Guardian
“Everett is one of the most unpredictable and original novelists working today.” —NPR
“It is hard to write or even think about his work without sounding like an inferior edition of Percival Everett. . . . One way to evaluate an artist is to observe the quantity and quality of misinterpretation his work begets. By this measure Everett ranks very highly.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Everett is a true American genius, a master artist.” —Oprah Daily
“Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders.” —Booklist
Now with a brilliant new package, a re-issue of the sophomore novel by Percival Everett, New York Times bestselling author of National Book Award winner James.
Haunting, provocative and bleakly funny, Walk Me to the Distance is Percival Everett’s brilliant reexamination of the Western, and a laconic tragicomedy about what it takes to survive in the last days of a bygone big-sky country.
In self-imposed exile after returning home from the war in Vietnam, David Larson meanders into the barren town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, where a local widow takes him under her wing. After making a sort of home among the town’s hardscrabble locals, David grudgingly adopts a young Vietnamese girl abandoned along the highway. This sets in motion a number of tragic turns as Western mythos and frontier justice clash against the tides of a changing world.
First published in 1985 by Clarion Books, Walk Me to the Distance was the sophomore novel of an iconic American voice. Over the course of his five decade career, Everett has written over twenty five books and been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize (for 2020’s Telephone), twice longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the recipient of the 2024 National Book Award for the “genius” (The Atlantic) James, a brilliantly imagined retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. James was a #1 New York Times bestseller and is being developed into film by Stephen Spielberg.
PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
View titles by Percival Everett
Praise
Praise for Percival Everett and Walk Me to the Distance
“Everett’s story has violence and pathos. . . . Unforgettable.” —People
“Everett manages to tell a great deal about one man’s moral dilemma and cluttered path to repatriation. The note of hope on which this moving story ends, though tentative, is fully deserved.” —Publishers Weekly
“God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics.” —The Wall Street Journal
“[Everett is a] prolific genius. . . . A literary jukebox.” —Elle
“Percival Everett [is] our current Great American Novelist. . . . Everett is one of the most, if not the most, interesting writers working today.” —Chicago Tribune
“If the unexpected always happens in Everett’s individual novels, the variety across the work also astonishes.” —The Washington Post
“Percival Everett is a giant of American letters.” —Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“One of our culture’s preeminent novelists.” —Los Angeles Times
“Percival Everett is an audacious, beguiling American master, whose wild trajectory has reached astonishing highs in the past decade.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
“[Everett] is a first-rate word wrangler.” —The Guardian
“Everett is one of the most unpredictable and original novelists working today.” —NPR
“It is hard to write or even think about his work without sounding like an inferior edition of Percival Everett. . . . One way to evaluate an artist is to observe the quantity and quality of misinterpretation his work begets. By this measure Everett ranks very highly.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Everett is a true American genius, a master artist.” —Oprah Daily
“Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders.” —Booklist
