The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair by Percival Everett. Little Rock. 1987. August House. 0874830133.  116 pages. paperback. Cover design by Communications Graphics. 

DESCRIPTION - A ranch hand inadvertently steps into the no-man's-land between an estranged father and son. A painter stakes his work and heart against the chic world of art speculation. A U.S. border patrolman hunts a desperate Mexican boy. A retired dentist turns his hands to the creation of miniature towns and landscapes and finds his fate entangled in theirs. These are some of the characters and situations you'll meet in THE WEATHER AND WOMEN TREAT ME FAIR, the first short story collection by novelist Percival Everett. Despite the wide-ranging action, these stories are unified by spare dialogue, tight plot development and a deadpan irony which is in evidence throughout. They are told in a casual, almost flat, tone - but don't be caught unawares: the understatement belies a vivid symbolic landscape that will suddenly appear before your eyes, like a mesa cropping up on the edge of the desert where Everett seems so at home. In all fifteen stories, heroes who tend to be loners grapple with alienation and falsity. Yet despite a surface pessimism, certain values emerge. Again and again, kinship, community and dignity prove resistant to the eroding and degrading forces of our times.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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