Walk Me to the Distance, Percival Everett
Walk Me to the Distance, Percival Everett
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Walk Me to the Distance

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Jared Zeus

Unabridged: 6 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/15/2025


Synopsis

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 set 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.

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 Judy on November 02, 2022

I enjoyed Percival Everett's latest novel, Trees, so much I decided to read all of his books. I had somehow gotten the idea that this author was too...what? Brainy, deep? Well, he is all that but he sure knows how to give the reader a good time! Walk Me to the Distance is actually his second novel. I......more

Goodreads review by Cody on May 23, 2025

A very humble, quiet novel with a lithesome arboreality to it. It’s nice to have a love story that doesn’t revolve around carnal rubby-rubby—there are too few of them. As only his second novel, it is better constructed than Suder and a crucial step toward his major evolution, Cutting Lisa. Not a bad......more

Goodreads review by Michael on October 15, 2011

I loved reading this book. It's the kind of stuff that you wish Denis Johnson would be capable of when writing about characters other than himself. A brutally honest, torn-open voice, shocked and aggrieved by the world but still adult and making do, carving out a place for itself. The voice is appro......more

Goodreads review by Andre(Read-A-Lot) on November 05, 2025

Although, Percival’s trademark humor was muted in this second published novel, it still contains some zaniness in the narrative. I feel like he leaned into a satirical voice, maybe taking shots at the western novel genre. There are no clear racial designations inside these pages, and very little in......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on July 17, 2025

Everett is hit or miss to me and this was a miss. It has all the pieces of an introspective, moody McCarthy-esque story about navigating PTSD as a veteran & dealing with disability in poverty. But it relies on shock value and contrivances that did not feel earned or needed. I see some reviews say th......more