Everybody Knows

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

With Everybody Knows, David Wesley Williams has somehow managed to pull off a laugh-out-loud post-apocalyptic satire-nothing less than a rowdy, music-besotted, whiskey-drenched tale of political shenanigans and Biblical flooding-even as the actual apocalypse barrels toward us, even as parsing the difference between parody and headline news grows more challenging with every subpoena. But more gobsmacking than the novel's trenchant wit is its gorgeous, allusive language and its taut, intricate structure. Come for an unforgettable cast of ne'er-do-wells, hard-luck prophets, and lovelorn writers; stay for what they tell us about who we are in this teetering moment.

-Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations and Graceland, At Last