Percival Everett's The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document-a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

About the Author
Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of nearly thirty books, including Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Assumption, Erasure, I am Not Sidney Poitier, and Glyph. He is the recipient of the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Believer Book Award, the 2006 PEN USA Center Award for Fiction, and the 2015 Guggenheim fellowship for fiction. He has fly fished in the West for over thirty years. He lives in Los Angeles.


Book Information
ISBN 9781597096287
Author Percival Everett
Format Hardback
Page Count 48
Imprint Red Hen Press
Publisher Red Hen Press
Weight(grams) 136g
Dimensions(mm) 209mm * 139mm * 8mm