Episode Description:
Join us in July as the PBS Books Readers Club dives into Percival Everett’s James, a New York Times Bestseller and reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett places Jim, the enslaved character, front and center in this powerful narrative, giving voice to his untold story.
In James Jim takes center stage, recounting his journey down the Mississippi River alongside Huck. This novel sheds light on Jim’s thoughts and experiences, often overlooked in Twain’s original work, while exploring profound themes of race, freedom, and friendship from a fresh perspective. Join author Percival Everett as he discusses his motivations behind this transformative retelling.
About the Book:
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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.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Guest Biography:
Percival Everett
Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.
Readers Club Hosts:
