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Loading... James: A Novel (original 2024; edition 2024)by Percival Everett (Author)
Work InformationJames by Percival Everett (2024)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) Romonko | May 18, 2024 |  As Everett says, Twain could not tell Jim's story, because he could not really know Jim's story. In this story, James has taught himself to read and is more educated than most of the whites who surround him. He speaks a Southern slave Blacklish to avoid their detection. At every point in this riveting story, I was routing for James to survive and gain his freedom. This is a masterpiece, one that should be read in high schools along with Huckleberry Finn. ( ) fromthecomfychair | May 18, 2024 | ) Narshkite | May 17, 2024 | bookczuk | May 16, 2024 |  ) MartyB2000 | May 14, 2024 |
 Lasman: Who is Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who is James in your novel, and what is the link between them? How do you connect these characters who share so much but also have quite different experiences across the two books? Everett: The Jim in Twain’s novel is an important character, and a symbolic character representing slavery, though Twain cautions us not to find any deeper meaning than an adventure story in it. I think that is being coy. Twain would not have been and was not capable of rendering Jim’s story. It was far removed from his experience, though he could have stood witness and did stand witness to many people like Jim. The Huck character suffers familial oppression, which in its way is no different from any other kind of oppression, but it’s still not the same thing as slavery. Huck doesn’t have to worry that when he runs, he will be murdered. When I started thinking about the novel, about the fact that Jim’s lack of agency was not a failure but an impossibility, I decided that I needed to give this character some agency. “My idea of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels,” writes Dwight Garner in his rave review of Percival Everett’s radical new reinterpretation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “James is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love.” (from Library of America marketing email) Notable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, THE SEATTLE TIMES, ELLE, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, AND OPRAH DAILY A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view • From the “literary icon” (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson’s critically acclaimed film American Fiction "If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read James, by Percival Everett" —The Washington Post 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. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.5400Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.38)
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