WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN\/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD<\/p>\n
A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising<\/p>\n
The protagonist of Percival Everett\u2019s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means \u201cnothing\u201d in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for \u201cnothing.\u201d) 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. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he\u2019ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks. <\/p>\n
With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill\u2019s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, \u201cProfessor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it\u2019s time we gave nothing back.\u201d <\/p>\n
“Dr. No” is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn\u2019t to say that it\u2019s not about anything. In fact, it\u2019s about villains. Bond villains. And that\u2019s not nothing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s Talk About Books with Reggie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","tags":[],"mec_category":[44,45],"class_list":["post-3579","mec-events","type-mec-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","mec_category-in-english-en","mec_category-in-the-library"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/mec-events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"mec_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csh-fr.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec_category?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}