Percival Everett and James Kincaid, _A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond_

THIS IS A brilliant and funny epistolary novel composed by Everett and one of his colleagues at USC. The book is not what its title proclaims, exactly, but instead the correspondence kicked off when a junior staffer of the staunch segregationist South Carolina senator named in the title sends a book proposal to Simon and Schuster. It is never clear whether the junior staffer (to whom Everett and Kincaid give the pitch-perfect name Barton Wilkes) has actually consulted with Sen. Thurmond about this project, but he is relatively clear about the proposed book's trajectory, which will be to show that Blacks in the former Confederate states never had it so good as they did before the Supreme Court messed everything up with Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The proposal makes the rounds at Simon and Schuster, the various letters and memos revealing a seething snakepit of office politics. Meanwhile, Wilkes keeps sending in tantalizing bits of what the Senator (supposedly) has in mind for the book and insinuating himself multifariously into said snakepit.

The proposal advances to the point where ghost writers are needed. Everett gets pulled in because a Black author will lend the project a certain credibility; Kincaid gets pulled in because...I don't know, the more the merrier, I guess. 

The personal crises of various editors and editorial assistants at Simon and Schuster mount up, Barton Wilkes egging them on the whole time. The tangled murk of the project gets murkier and more tangled and ever more overtly racist. Everett and Kincaid eventually take a special trip to South Carolina (where Everett in fact grew up and went to high school) to meet the senator himself.

Everett has a knack for being highly entertaining while honing very sharp satirical points, and that knack is fully on display in this one.