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Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent books include Dr. No, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; So Much Blue; Erasure; and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. More about this author >
From the publisher:
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Percival Everett’s James is a surgical disarticulation of the bones that hold American racialism in place—more than physiognomy, our language has been shaped to keep us apart. James extols the virtues of literacy, self-naming, entelechy, and freedom, while showing us that these virtues mean little if they are expressed merely for the self. The protagonist carries us to a greener territory, a new world, where signifying is for beauty’s sake—never again because of the whip.
Percival Everett accepts the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction for James
