Damned If I Do, Percival Everett
Damned If I Do, Percival Everett
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Damned If I Do
Stories

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Tim Morgan

Unabridged: 4 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/27/2026

Synopsis

Damned If I Do is an exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure.People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid.A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high–speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty–two parking tickets, and a sexual–identity problem.Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a literary shapeshifter, an author whose work defies genre and expectation. Born in 1956, he has carved out a career as one of America’s most daring and intellectually playful writers, blending satire, philosophy, and social critique across novels, short stories, and poetry. With a bibliography spanning dozens of books-including Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, a Pulitzer Prize finalist-Everett tackles race, identity, and the absurdities of modern life with razor-sharp wit and profound depth.

A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett is also an accomplished painter, musician, and horse trainer, embodying the restless curiosity that defines his fiction. His work, often compared to that of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, resists easy categorization, making him one of contemporary literature’s most unpredictable and essential voices.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on November 16, 2017

I'm beginning to believe Percival Everett knows everything there is to know about being a human. And his ways of expressing it astound me. Damned if I Do, a short story anthology, is my fourth Everett book and it is just as unique as the three novels I've recently read, and within it, the stories ar......more

Goodreads review by Blair on March 16, 2021

Many of the stories in Damned If I Do are laced with a hint of the strange or absurd. Occasionally, this is overt, as in the first story, ‘The Fix’, wherein the owner of a sandwich shop takes in a stranger who possesses an uncanny ability to fix everything: a fridge, a car, a marriage, teeth... ‘The......more

Goodreads review by Paul on July 15, 2014

Percival Everett is one my favorite writers, even if he's relatively ignored by the literary establishment. I would have given damned if i do four stars, but "The Appropriation of Cultures" is a great story - thus the extra star. A year or so ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. did a piece on PBS about a bla......more

Goodreads review by Cody on August 28, 2024

The first Everett story collection that really works for me. I’ll always hate the form but PE is working within some priorly established settings here, making it feel somewhat of a return. Maybe that’s just the strength of his hold over me. I neither know nor care.......more

Goodreads review by Robert on January 13, 2023

Even when Percival Everett writes short stories they stand out......more

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