Everybody Knows
The rain-sodden, southern world of David Wesley Williams' Everybody Knows overflows with satiric fun as it churns up a rich detritus of Biblical allusions, political backstory, musical opinions, literary puns, and local anecdotes. The story, set a decade hence, introduces a raft of characters, too, including musicians, an escaped felon, a tyrannical governor atop his state's old electric chair, various and likable sidekicks and mistresses, and even a writer, the ironic double of the work's author, whose enthusiasm for his subject matter spills over into strongly opinionated footnotes. And that's all before the pirates arrive. Original, energetic, and obsessive, Everybody Knows recalls the worlds of Faulkner, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Kennedy Toole in its broad wit and sorrowful joy.
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David Wesley Williams, a native Kentuckian now living in Memphis, Tennessee, is the author of the novels Everybody Knows and Long Gone Daddies. His short fiction has been published by the Oxford American, Kenyon Review Online, and such literary journals as The Common and The Pinch. His stories have also appeared in Akashic Books' Memphis Noir and the Harper Perennial collection Forty Stories. He plays the musical saw in a cowpunk band called Citizen Cain't. All but the last is true.
David Wesley Williams's new novel Everybody Knows is a wild ride, at once a hilarious satire of our improbable present and a frightening look at our likely future. The scope of his vision is both CinemaScope and periscope, as he trains his lens on global perils like climate change, Covid, and political demagoguery and localized Southern preoccupations with storytelling, Gibson guitars, and sour mash. The star of the novel is language, and this flood of words, with its eddies, whirlpools, and other perils, will knock you off your feet and carry you thrillingly from beginning to end.
-Jay Jennings, author of Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City, editor of Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, and former senior editor at Oxford American
Pluck some characters out of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, Sonny Boy Williamson II, the Bible, and Wes Anderson movies. Place them in torrential rains and a flood. Hand them over to a genius storyteller. Mix well. Here's what you get in David Wesley Williams's riotous novel Everybody Knows. I love this wild ride.
-George Singleton, author of You Want More: Selected Stories
