In his 2001 novel, Erasure, Percival Everett conjured up the unforgettable Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a middle-class writer of challenging fiction who enjoys a decidedly quiet (think polite applause) career until, fed up with a publishing industry and reading public interested only in “authentic” black voices and “authentic” black experience, he writes a pseudonymous send-up of street fiction that he thinks is absurd and that the rest of the world thinks is genius.
