 First edition (US) | |
| Author | Percival Everett |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Graywolf Press (US) Influx Press (UK) |
Publication date | 2021 |
| Preceded by | Telephone |
| Followed by | Dr. No |
The Trees is a 2021 novel by American author Percival Everett, published by Graywolf Press.
Set predominantly in the small town of Money, Mississippi, the novel follows a series of murders that seem to follow identical patterns.
In Money, Mississippi, a white man called Junior Junior is found dead in his own home with the body of an unknown Black man beside him. When the bodies are taken to the morgue, it is soon discovered that the body of the unknown Black man has disappeared. The body is found again in the home of Junior Junior's cousin, Wheat, who has also been murdered. Shortly after, the body of the Black man disappears again.
Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, are sent to Money to investigate the situation. Ed and Jim go to a local bar frequented by the Black community of Money where they discover that both Junior and Wheat are relatives of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who accused the teenage Emmett Till of making sexual advances at her leading to his lynching and death. Ed and Jim believe that the disappearing body bears a striking resemblance to Emmett Till's battered body.
More bodies begin to pile up around the country. Each features one or more white men who have been castrated with the bodies of Black or Asian men beside them. Ed and Jim are able to find the identity of the Black man found at the original crime scene. They trace it to a company that sells bodies for research. They also begin to suspect Gertrude Penstock, a white-passing waitress they met in Money, and her 105 year old great-grandmother Mama Z are involved in the original murders.
Unbeknown to Ed and Jim, this is revealed to be true as Gertrude and a group of like-minded Black individuals had orchestrated the deaths of Wheat and Junior Junior as retaliation for their father's part in murdering Emmett Till. However they are baffled by the other murders.
Reports of the other murders reveal that large groups of Black and Asian men who appear impervious to bullets, have started duplicating the murders orchestrated by Mama Z and Gertrude.
To write the novel, Everett researched lynching in the United States. [1] For this research, Everett purchased books dealing with elements of lynching, enough to incidentally develop a "lynching section in [his] library". [1] Everett attributes the humor in his novels, including in The Trees, to the influence of Mark Twain. [2] [3]
The novel received mostly favorable reviews. [4] Mary F. Corey, in a positive review published by the Los Angeles Review of Books , wrote that the novel included a "Twainian level of wit and meanness". [5] Joyce Carol Oates called it "[r]eally profound writing...about subjects of great tragic and political significance. [6] Carole V. Bell, in a review published by NPR, also praised the novel, writing that the book is a "combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor blade sharp insight". [7]
Published in the UK by Influx Press, the novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize [8] [9] [10] that was announced on September 6, 2022. [11] It also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2022 for Fiction. [12]
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Emmett Louis Till was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimised ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
Money is an unincorporated community near Greenwood in Leflore County, Mississippi, United States, in the Mississippi Delta. It has fewer than 100 residents, down from 400 in the early 1950s when a cotton mill operated there. Money is located on a railroad line along the Tallahatchie River, a tributary of the Yazoo River in the eastern part of the Mississippi Delta. The community has ZIP code 38945 in the Greenwood, Mississippi micropolitan area.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley was an American educator and activist. She was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old teenager murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after accusations that he had whistled at a Caucasian grocery store cashier named Carolyn Bryant. For Emmett's funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."
Black Water is a 1992 novella by the American writer and professor Joyce Carol Oates. It is a roman à clef based on the Chappaquiddick incident, in which U.S. senator Ted Kennedy crashed a car and caused the death by drowning of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. The novella was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction.
Michael Thomas is an American author. He won the 2009 International Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel Man Gone Down, receiving a prize of €100,000. Man Gone Down is also recommended by The New York Times.
Joe Pullen or Joe Pullum was an African-American sharecropper who was killed by a posse of local white citizens near Drew, Mississippi on December 15, 1923.
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels, Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O'Henry Prize for her short stories.
The Other Americans is a mystery novel written by Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami. The novel was published in 2019 by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Jason Mott is an American novelist and poet. His fourth novel, Hell of a Book, won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
Hell of a Book is a 2021 book by Jason Mott. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a 2020 novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates, about a man who was killed by the police and the aftermath of his death on his family. Its title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman.
I Am More than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham is a memoir by Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused the African-American 14-year-old Emmett Till of touching her hand and flirting with her at her store in 1955, an incident which led to his lynching. Written before 2008, the manuscript was originally planned for a 2036 posthumous release, but leaked by historian Timothy Tyson and released to the public in July 2022.
Influx Press is an independent British publishing company, based in north London, founded in 2012 by Gary Budden and Kit Caless. They are known for publishing "innovative and challenging fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction from across the UK and beyond".
The Family Chao is a 2022 novel by the American novelist Lan Samantha Chang, published by W. W. Norton.
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