And of course the very next thing that a person does after buying it is plop this monstrous gift shop theme park on it. It’s funny and absurd at times, but the more you think about it, the more you realize, Yeah, that would happen, the American government would sell the rights to the Grand Canyon. But here, the extreme Americanness of this particular setup really stood out to me. First, thanks for writing the introduction to the reissue of my book Erasure, that was great.īTThere’s a dark exuberance to the book, this sort of gleeful rollicking absurdity that you bring to almost every one of your stories. Here Taylor speaks with Everett about Grand Canyon, Inc., self-mythologies, and the American fantasy of the western.īrandon TaylorI’m so glad we get to talk. The pairing of their work is especially resonant.īrandon Taylor, whose novel Real Life was short-listed for the Booker Prize of 2020, wrote the introduction for last year’s reissue of Everett’s canonical novel Erasure (2001). Both Everett and Prince subvert the iconography of the West, interrogating its mythic visual and narrative tropes with a canny sideways view.

is presented alongside work by Richard Prince, another of our great tricksters. In his novella G rand Canyon, Inc., published by Gagosian’s Picture Books imprint, he takes us on a bawdy trip through the American West via the larger-than-life character of Rhino Tanner. Percival Everett is a trickster, his writing always shifting and twisting in dazzling and surprising ways, his books dancing a two-step with the reader.

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