Erasure
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a Black intellectual novelist, writes a parody of ghetto fiction out of frustration. The parody becomes a bestseller. Everett published Erasure in 2001 to modest sales; the 2023 film adaptation (American Fiction) brought it the audience it deserved. A satire of the publishing industry's appetite for "authentic" Black suffering, and one of the funniest novels about race in America.
Everett reprints Monk's parody novel in full, all seventy pages of it, and the joke wears thin long before Van Go Jenkins stops talking. The satire of publishing is a fish in a barrel; the quieter family story (the mother's Alzheimer's, the dead sister) is better, and the two halves never quite agree to be one book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
