Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees, James and Erasure.

An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem.

Everett skewers race, class, identity, surrealism and much more in this masterful short story collection from one of America's most inventive living writers.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

Rooted in a profound sense of rural place, [the stories in Damned If I Do] are original and subtle, canny and soulful – full, too, of sublimely sardonic humour. As for its characters, they’re so multidimensional that their ethnicity is but one item on a long list of expectation-dashing attributes. * The Guardian *
It's hard to pigeonhole Percival Everett. Working between the traditions of the academy and the African American tall tale, he writes with a sharp satirical voice * Playboy *
I think Percival Everett is a genius. He's a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him. -- Terry McMillan
Clever and thought-provoking, this is a memorable collection * Publishers Weekly *

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees, Dr. No and James. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novel Erasure has been adapted into the major film American Fiction, which was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.