Brilliant! This rather moving tale of the dead man who is in fact a huge improvement on the living version of himself takes on the genuinely crazy stuff of modern America.

(4.5*)What a bold book, exploring death and life with humor and sympathy...

I actually picked this book up because I liked the cover. Usually I put the book down just as quick as I pick it up after I figure out what the content is but this time I bought it. There was something about the idea of a man on the way to commit suicide and the interruption of his plans as death found him first in the form of an oncoming van. Not to mention that he sits up in his coffin three days later with his head stitched back on. (These aren't spoilers by the way, you would learn them from...

[Public Library copy]Entertaining absurdist literature full of witty comments and observations about contemporary society (which is reflected in the title). In this unique story, protagonist Theodore Street is decapitated in a car accident, but returns to the land of the living at his funeral. His reanimation spurs riots, and prompts fanatics to kidnap him (one group is certain he's a devil to kill, the other believes he's a phenomenon to study). Throughout the action and reaction are Theodore's...

(4.5)"...then, as the choir ended its final amen with a harmonious hum, Theodore Street sat up in his coffin."With this, logic and possibilities are thrown away as a bevy of loved ones encounter this comical farce.Ted Street is a sad man. It's been a rough couple years for the guy. Firstly, he keeps coming up for tenure at the University he teaches for, but without a book to his name, he can't obtain a Ph.D, therefore making his job null and void and secondly, he has had an extra-marital affair

More people should be reading Everett for his humanity, wordplay, and anarchic comedy—if not this title in particular. In his novel Glyph, an infant prodigy fluent in Derridean theory is abducted by desperate scientists in what becomes an hilarious spoof of high-end lit-speak and an unsubtle poke at Evil Science People. The satire here is also of the Subtle-as-a-Boulder variety, taking on religious lunatics and immoral governments across a novel that lapses into ridiculous emotional manipulation...

The short version: At a sperm bank, someone mixes the joy juices of Chuck Palahnuik with those of Will Self. This book is the product of the XYXY union. The long version:Sometimes after I've read a book I enjoy getting a bit sidetracked in my review process by passing facetious comment on either the critics comments, the blurb or the book cover. After all a book is a neat little package and a way of conveying words to us in a tidy way which means we don't lose the pages, get something attractive...

The story of failed academic Ted Street, who, on the way to commit suicide, gets decapitated. And then at his funeral he wakes up. Everett is less interested in the mechanisms that might make such a thing possible than in the emotional and psychological fallout this creates in Ted and his family. And so long as the novel exhumes the failures and (limited) success of Ted's life, it is utterly compelling. Brief flashbacks take the reader back into Ted's ordinary life and his ordinary mistakes lead...

A surreal story about Ted Street, a guy who gets his head cut off in a car accident, then gets up and walks out of his funeral three days later. Panic and media frenzies ensue. Everett’s writing style is a tad too dry for my taste, and a couple of the subplots seem pointless, but he does a good job of stringing the reader along to find out just how dead (or not) Ted really is. If nothing else, you’ll get a weird theory of what’s REALLY going on in Area 51.

This was an uneasy satire, setting it's sights on the topical targets of 2004: Evangelicals, neo-cons and the media. A despondent academic is driving to his suicide when he is unexpectedly decapitated in a traffic accident. He sits up and begins speaking three days later at his funeral. How's this possible? Journalists want an interview. Zealots want to kill him as a diabolical agent and the government wants to utilize his biochemistry to create immortal soldiers. Each of these plots surface and...

The first scene in the book, where a professor who is in trouble because he can't publish a book and he's up for tenure, is probably what happened in the process of making this book. It starts out very interesting, and turns into a load of bad jokes and kooky characters, and basically, garbage entertainment.This book starts out as a novel that questions death, and presents some interesting ideas *especially this one part where the main chr. has these dreams. About a third of the way in, it dies;...

Though not quite as compelling upon re-read as it was when I first picked this up in high school, American Desert has stuck with me and remained haunting. It's written with almost startling simplicity, though it conveys a lot of sophistication in its descriptions of marital unease (there's an affair), academia (there's the publish-or-perish syndrome, the banality, the tenure-track daydreams). And the characterizations are richest for the supporting cast, which lends to some weird pacing but I th...

There are plenty of ideas in this novel that would make a good story. Unfortunately they never get pulled together to do it much good. For example, the lead character can read critical moments in other people's pasts. But this is never used to any real effect in the story. The characters are kind of two dimensional as well.

Odd, existential, yet delightful, American Desert is the story of Ted Street, who, on his way to committing suicide, is decapitated by a UPS truck. However, Ted is not dead. Or is he? Sitting up in his coffin at his own funeral, Ted begins a whole new kind of life. Is Ted a devil? An angel? A ghost? The Messiah? Or, something else entirely?This book grapples with questions of life and death in a wholly unique and hilarious way. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but also gets one thinking about what kin...

I was elated to start reading this on the premise alone (much like Erasure, but I didn't expect to clutch it to my chest for several minutes before shedding tears when I finished. Might say more at a later time.

If you pick up this book put on your seat belt also. Percival Everett's sense of humor and commentary is hilarious and not for the faint of heart, mind or spirit. I wish that I taught grad courses in order to include this book. AMERICAN DESERT has the flavor of Ishmael Reed's JAPANESE BY SPRING. Such great satire and academic politics that it makes you want to go and slap your department chair (ha ha ha). In this field of academia, we sometimes lose our heads, feel dead, as we walk through the d...

A Jim Jarmusch film waiting to be made.Qanon has nothing on this x

This is a story about life and death. The library labeled it science fiction because the impossible happens. (You’ll quickly find out what that is if you read the book’s description or a few pages, but I’m not going to spoil it.) But it is not science fiction. Nor is it a thriller, although there are certainly aspects of that. It’s very funny, but I would never call it a comedy. After you read enough of Percival Everett’s work (this is my twelfth book), you begin to recognize certain repeating c...

A satire on American religion, media obsession with the freakish, bureaucracy, the military/industrial complex, and, to a lesser extent, academic life. At the beginning of the book, an English professor who has failed to get tenure & is ashamed of a recent extramarital affair, decides to commit suicide but is decapitated in an auto accident on the way to do so. At the funeral, with the stitches in his neck where the funeral director has reattached his head fully evident, he sits up and begins ta...

Satire? Funny? Dark? But I liked Ted Street after all - took him a long time, but maybe there is hope for anyone at that rate.