CLSC Announcement: Dr. No

The Department of Education has announced Dr. No by Percival Everett, as a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for Week Two of the 2023 Summer Assembly Season: “Games: A Celebration of Our Most Human Pastimes.”

Winner of the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Dr. No is the latest novel from the prolific, genre-bending, experimental writer, Percival Everett.

Dr. No, which borrows its title from the early James Bond story and subsequent film, tells the “unhinged” story of a brilliant professor of mathematics, Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.” His parents, he says, were mathematicians and believed that two negatives yielded a positive.) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. 

In this novel, nothing is real, and it is worth breaking into Fort Knox to steal it. Or at least, this is what Wala Kitu’s employer and eccentric billionaire John Sill, who wants to become a literal James Bond villain, believes.

Dr. No is a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. It is a caper, a play on concepts, and a dizzying literary game about nothing. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything.

Mr. Everett will offer a masterclass talk on craft followed by an audience Q&A before his presentation. The time and location will be announced soon.

Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections, including Dr. No, The Trees, Telephone, So Much Blue, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure. Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Dos Passos Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, The 2010 Believer Book Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, a Creative Capital Award, BS the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.