I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Description

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America

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 dinnertable 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?”

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Percival Everett
Published: 05/26/2009
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555975272
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 0.70″ H x 9.02″ L x 6.00″ W

Award: 2010 Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award Winner – Fiction

About the Author

Percival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of seventeen novels, including The Water Cure, Wounded, and Glyph.