I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett
I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

I Am Not Sidney Poitier
A Novel

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Amir Abdullah

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/26/2023


Synopsis

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinner table explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: "What's your name?" a kid would ask. "Not Sidney," I would say. "Okay, then what is it?"

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 Andy on May 07, 2023

This book genuinely made me LOL, which is something very few books do. I'm tempted to give five stars, but the dream sequences and some of the more abstract humour failed to hit the right notes for me. Incidentally, you don't NEED to have watched Sidney Poitier's back catalogue to enjoy this novel,......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on January 16, 2019

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett [UPDATE: 1/16/19--see note at the end of this reviewOnce after dinner, as we sat in front of the television watching an Adventures of Superman rerun, I asked, "Was my father handsome?" She replied, "Some might say yes." "Was he smart?" I asked. She stared at t......more

Goodreads review by Jonathan on January 04, 2025

Second time around was as good or better than the first. When you become enamored with an author as I am with Professor Everett, you gobble up everything he writes. The point I'm making is that books he'd written after this come to mind and you realize the favorite characters from them were developed......more

Goodreads review by Michael on December 22, 2024

I picked up a copy of "Suder" years ago from a Barnes & Noble bargain book table, enjoyed it, and promptly drifted away from Percival Everett. Now, decades later, 2024 has been enriched by The Percival Everett Experience. "James" is one of my all-time favorite reads and "Trees," "Erasure," and "I Am......more

Goodreads review by Dave on October 18, 2023

I picked up the novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) by Percival Everett 1) because I thought his novel The Trees was amazing, electric, shocking, a disturbingly hilarious dark satire about lynching in America, and 2) I thought this title was very funny, a kind of take on Abbott and Costello’s “Who’......more