Walk Me to the Distance by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1985. Ticknor & Fields. 0899193218. 209 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo: Martha Jordan.  

DESCRIPTION - David Larson can't go home again; that's given. So David, recently returned from Vietnam, heads for the West of his imagination. He fetches up in Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he settles in with a one-legged, widow-lady sheep rancher named Sixbury and her severely retarded son. When Butch, a seven-year-old Vietnamese war orphan, and Sixbury's son abruptly disappear, David is forced to a desperate - and correct - conclusion. In classic style, a posse is organized and goes about its mortal business. Like it or not, David makes his commitment. With spare strokes, Percival Everett paints the Western landscape as it is today, clinging to a mythical heritage and a frontier code that may be seriously skewed in a world that has passed it by. In big-sky country the mere act of living is hard and cruel and heart-stopping. Of Everett's first novel, SUDER, the Los Angeles Times said, ‘Percival Everett has created here a mad work of comic genius. . . to make up a narrative that has never, never been told before.' His new novel brings to mind the stark beauty of HUD and SHANE and THE OX-BOW INCIDENT.

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.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author