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Join us for a special Morning Book club author with John Vercher, author of Devil is Fine. John will be joining us via Zoom!LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • INDIE NEXT PICK • NAMED A BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR BY ELECTRIC LIT • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 • A CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF 2024 • FEATURED IN THE LA TIMES, THE ROOT, AND THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.
Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.
John Vercher lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He has a BA in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in creative writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. John was an assistant teaching professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, was the inaugural Wilma Dykeman writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and is the 2024–2025 artist-in-residence at Monmouth University. His debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and Booklist. It was nominated for the Edgar Award and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut Novel. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, called “shrewd and explosive” by the New York Times, was named a Best Book of Summer 2022 by Book Riot and Publishers Weekly and a Booklist Editors’ Choice book of 2022. His novel, Devil Is Fine, was named one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2024 and has been longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Please register so we can set the community room up with appropriate seating.
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