Introduction: "It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. But it's a thing. But it doesn't mean it has to remain that way."

This marks the third time in the last five years that I have written an introduction or a profile in a special issue of a journal that involved Percival Everett in some way. The first introduction was to a 2013 special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies that presented a collection of essays on Everett's work. That issue was the product of what was then—and still may be—still may bestill may be—the largest-ever gathering of Everett scholars to meet in North America, which took place during the 2009 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. Everett also attended that conference, and heard some of the articles in conference-paper form. The second introduction I wrote was published in Ploughshares, when Everett served as the guest editor for the Fall 2014 issue, and he recommended to them that I write a short profile of his work. Now, here we are again. Joe Weixlmann, the long-time and now-retired editor of African American Review, was invited by Nathan Grant to edit this issue, and Joe generously asked me to join him.

I mention my role in all of this because of the personal way that many scholars of Everett's work are implicated by the choice of making this writer a subject of study. In my introduction to the Canadian Review of American Studies issue, I referred to the relatively small group of critics who study Everett's work as a "coterie," an apt description that is used in his 2004 novel A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid, to describe those who read and study his work. This description has stayed with me, and I return to it often in thinking about the still quite small (although growing) group of scholars who read and study Everett's work. I have now met and worked with many of these people, and am fortunate enough to count them among my friends—hence the personal association I feel with this coterie.

This expression is not appropriate because we are uncritical proponents for or supporters of Everett's work, but because, as with any group of scholars who give their time to the work of a particular writer, the choice of writer says, I think, something about those within this group. The same may easily be said, obviously, of those who study Morrison, Joyce, Shakespeare, or Wallace, to name writers almost (clearly, almost) at random. In the case of those who work on Everett, there is an agreement, or at least an acceptance, that there is value in doing things a little unexpectedly when, for instance, the subject of race and aesthetics comes up. Discerning that value, especially in a country whose culture is so heavily preoccupied with race, and with specific expressions, understandings, and misunderstandings of it, as well as with arguing over those expressions, understandings, and misunderstandings, carries with it great importance, and few writers present as many potential invitations for these considerations as does Percival Everett. The value, then, is as often in what is not present in a recognizable way in an Everett text as in what is. I am tempted to expound here on the proposition that the meaning of absence helps us address a potential absence of meaning, but will refrain for everyone's sake.

And while I tend, usually, to return to race when I discuss Everett in my own work, primarily because of my own interest in such questions and the myriad inventive and constructive ways that Everett's work helps me consider them from perspectives at which I had not arrived on my own, the scholarship that Joe and I have collected here examines how valuable Everett's work is in the innumerable ways that it presents itself, ways that far exceed certainly my own critical imagination. What we have assembled here are seven essays that together gesture...