Erasure

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a Black literary novelist and classics professor whose latest work has been rejected by 17 publishers as not "Black enough." Furious at the publishing industry's appetite for ghetto fiction, he writes a parody under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a violent thug-life memoir titled My Pafology, which his agent sells for a six-figure advance. The book becomes the bestseller Monk's real work never managed, gets shortlisted for a major prize Monk himself is judging, and forces him to confront what his own complicity in the joke has cost him. Everett embeds the full fake novel inside the real one.