“Half an Inch of Water” by Percival Everett

Rattlesnake bites, wild horses, and mountain snowstorms—these stories, in their restless traversal of the American West, cut through the fabric of everyday life to examine what lies beneath it. Check out our Winter 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Half an Inch of Water” by Percival Everett.

November 2, 2015

Half an Inch of Water was the winter 2015 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today.

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A new collection of stories set in the West from “one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers” — NPR

Percival Everett’s long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004’s Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog.

For the plainspoken men and women of these stories ― fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians ― small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.

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Percival Everett is the author of more than twenty books. He is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives outside Los Angeles.
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To view all Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.