Don’t Miss Percival Everett and Miranda July

Dear Festival Friends,

Percival Everett and Miranda July joined our Festival lineup months before they became the toasts of the 2024 literary year. We’d like to think it’s our spidey sense for new releases that will make prize committees giddy, but we had merely recognized the obvious: These two authors had written unforgettably great books. Thanks to scheduling kismet and our persistence (not badgering), they accepted our invitation to the Festival in May, and we can’t wait.

If there’s such a thing as a literary polymath, Percival Everett is it. He’s written poetry, westerns, a spy caper, retellings of Greek myths, and what’s best described as a horror-comedy. He can’t be pigeonholed, though critics have tried. “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer,” he once said, “and I find it all kind of silly. I write fiction.” His novel Telephone, a choose-your-own adventure published in three different versions, was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. Trees—a mordantly funny tale about, improbably, zombies and racism—was nominated for the 2022 Booker Prize. Everett’s latest novel, James, combines picaresque action, humor, and scorching social commentary in a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved runaway Jim. It won the 2024 National Book Award, was short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and made The New York Times’ list of the ten best books of the year.

Miranda July, meanwhile, is a straight-up polymath. In addition to writing fiction, she’s a prolific filmmaker and multimedia artist (visual art, performance art, spoken word, fashion design, even a phone app!) with a seemingly bottomless well of creative juices. “There’s a certain strength in working across mediums,” she told New York magazine ten years and countless projects ago. “It’s like not putting your eggs in one basket, and not feeling vulnerable to any one market or any one critic or your own feeling about that medium.”

July’s latest work—done in our favorite medium, the written word—is the novel All Fours. By now you’re probably familiar with the adjectives associated with it: “steamy,” “outrageous,” “gutsy,” etc. But it’s not just voyeuristic eroticism that makes the book a standout. The story of a middle-aged wife and mother who steps out of her everyday life to pursue her sexual obsessions, All Fours is about so much more—notably, how women reconcile the stresses of aging and family obligation with creativity and a sense of self. The book was short-listed for the National Book Award and, like James, was named a New York Times top ten book of 2024.

We hope you’ll join us when we welcome Everett and July to the Festival May 16–18, along with other big names from 2024, including Santa Fe’s own Hampton Sides, whose latest, The Wide Wide Sea also hit the New York Times top ten, and Deborah Jackson Taffa, whose memoir Whiskey Tender was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Check out our website to see who else is in our author lineup (Amy Tan, Michael Pollan, Heather Cox Richardson, and Colum McCann, to name just a handful), which we’ll be adding to in the coming weeks.

Festival tickets will be available for purchase later this month, so please stay tuned.

Finally, our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires. Many Festival authors, past and present, live in the area, and our team has deep personal ties there. Please consider a donation to relief efforts if you are able. Click here for a list of organizations where your gift will have the most impact.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair