4.7
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12,384 ratings
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. • From the “cult literary icon” (Oprah Daily), Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime
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 The 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 “cult 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.
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ISBN-10
0593862732
ISBN-13
978-0593862735
Print length
368 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Random House Large Print
Publication date
March 18, 2024
Dimensions
6.03 x 0.97 x 9.18 inches
Item weight
2.31 pounds
Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.
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I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.
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ASIN :
B0C8MGS6GR
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1344 KB
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, THE SEATTLE TIMES, ELLE, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, AND OPRAH DAILY
“The cult favorite author’s electric new work. . . James completely reimagines one-half of Finn’s famous duo, elevating him from unwitting sidekick to reluctant hero. . . Everett brings that laser-sharp wit to James, creating a radical new American adventure.”—W Magazine
“James offers page-turning excitement but also off-kilter philosophical picaresque. . . Gripping, painful, funny, horrifying, this is multi-level entertainment, a consummate performance to the last."—The Guardian “Blasted clean of Twain’s characterization, Jim emerges here as a man of great dignity, altruism, and intelligence. . . Clever, soulful, and full of righteous rage, [Jim’s] long-silenced voice resounds through this remarkable novel. Subversive and thrilling, James is destined to become a modern classic.” —Esquire “[A] careful and thought-provoking auditing of Huckleberry Finn. . . [James is] a kind of commentary or midrash, broadening our understanding of an endangered classic by bringing out the tragedy behind the comic facade. And that is no small thing. I expect that James will be spoken of as a repudiation of Huckleberry Finn, but a book like this can only be written in a spirit of engaged devotion. More than a correction, it’s a rescue mission. And maybe this time it will work.” —The Wall Street Journal “Heir to Mark Twain’s satirical vision, Everett turns a boyhood memoir into a neo-fugitive slave narrative thriller. . . Using erasure, Everett has produced a daring emendation. Redacting swaths of Huck Finn, he’s revealed another code: the untranslated story of James’s self-emancipation. . . James is a provocative, enlightening work of literary art.” —The Boston Globe “[Everett is a] prolific genius. . . A literary jukebox. . . If anyone is poised to casually (after all, he has bills) write a masterpiece that not only becomes instant canon but also sets a brush fire to the current ones it stands upon, it’s Everett. And that’s exactly what he’s done with James.” —Elle
"Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too."—The New York Times
“[A] sly response to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. . . While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lampooned American society through the naiveté of its young narrator, James critiques White racism with the sharp insight of a character who’s felt the lash...What’s most striking, ultimately, is the way James both honors and interrogates Huck Finn, along with the nation that reveres it.”—The Washington Post
"Percival Everett [is] our current Great American Novelist. . . [JAMES] is a masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own. . . I almost cannot imagine a future where teachers assign The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without also assigning James alongside it. . . Everett is one of the most, if not the most interesting writers working today.”—The Chicago Tribune
“To call James a retelling would be an injustice. Everett sends Mark Twain’s classic through the looking glass. What emerges is no longer a children’s book, but a blood-soaked historical novel stripped of all ornament. . . Genius.”—The Atlantic
"Once you’ve picked up Everett’s James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you’ll know that only Everett could take on the task of allowing Mark Twain’s character Jim to show what was missing from the original story.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Percival Everett continues his blistering pace of unforgettable fiction with James. . . Everett infuses this well-known story with a refreshingly contemporary jolt of agency, intelligence, and compassion, bringing new life to the character of Jim and the American epic.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Using nuance and vulnerability to emphasize Jim’s humanity, [Everett leaves a] stamp on the literary landscape as he dismantles the stereotypes of the enslaved humans depicted in Twain’s classic. . . Percival Everett has accomplished more than humanizing a marginalized voice. He has, once again, delivered a seminal work of literary reparation.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Everett’s James isn’t out to displace Twain’s book. It’s carrying out a bolder, more ingenuous, and, characteristic of its author, more subversive agenda...Everett endows Jim with greater dimension and nuance than his original creator did. Huckleberry Finn provided Jim with courage, dignity, and virtue. James bestows upon him the greater, if more complicated, privilege of full (if not yet unfettered) humanity."—The New Republic
“Playful and resonant. . . Everett has plenty of derisive fun here, dissecting and subverting damaging stereotypes. . . For a writer who often plays by few rules, Everett has drawn on what he knows best here – that freedom can be won, one word at a time. Add levity and serious intent and you have a novel that's a class act.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Audacious. . . Everett [gives] Jim—who, we learn, prefers to be called James—his agency, letting his intelligence and compassion shine through. James is a poignant if often distressing reintroduction to a beloved character who deserved better.”—Time
"Ingenious"—People
“Percival Everett with virtuosic wit presents a spin on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”—Vanity Fair
"More than audacious. With James, Everett has mounted a high-stakes, revisionist raid not just on Twain’s imagination but on ours as a nation. . . [Everett is] a brilliantly sly novelist."—Garden & Gun
"We may not be meeting Jim for the first time, but we’re introduced to him in a bold new way."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"In an astounding riposte, the much-lauded Everett (Dr. No, 2022) rewrites [Huck Finn] as a liberation narrative, told from Jim (or rather James’) point of view...An absolutely essential read."—Booklist (Starred Review)
"The audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey...One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him."—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“Ingenious … Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself.”—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)
"James is funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting. In telling the story of Jim instead of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett delivers a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history. I found myself cheering both the writer and his hero. Who should read this book? Every single person in the country.” —Ann Patchett
"Percival Everett is a giant of American letters, and James is a canon-shatteringly great book. Unforgiving and compassionate, beautiful and brutal, a tragedy and a farce, this brilliant novel rewrites literary history to let us hear the voices it has long suppressed.” —Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“This is a brilliant, accessible, and very necessary companion to Huckleberry Finn.” —Dave Eggers, author of The Eyes and the Impossible “James is a masterpiece. I read it late this summer, and I have already recommended it to enough people to put it on the bestseller lists, in the classrooms, libraries, book clubs and hands in which it so rightly belongs.” —Francine Prose “Percival Everett is a genre.” —Kiese Laymon “Pure brilliance. Funny, wise, gracious; this may be Everett's best book yet.” —Bonnie Garmus “Percival Everett is an audacious, beguiling American master, whose wild trajectory has reached astonishing highs in the past decade. Now comes James, which enlists and devours not only Mark Twain’s novel but aspects of Melville, Ellison, and even Kafka to makes an irrevocable intervention into the canon. Everett is simply playing this game at a higher level, and it is the most serious game imaginable.” —Jonathan Lethem
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Percival L. Everett
PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book 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. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
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Customer reviews
4.7 out of 5
12,384 global ratings
Amazon Customer
5
Wow -- a reimagining of Huck Finn that will set the record straight
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2024
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James by Percival Everett is a retelling of the story of Huck Finn by James himself. Brilliant and revelatory, we see the life of James through his own eyes – eyes not shaded by prejudice or power. James runs away when he hears that he is about to be sold, determined to return for his wife and daughter once the danger has passed. He runs into Huck, who has faked his own death after being beaten by his father, and as in the original story, they build a raft and sail down river to escape the men looking for them. Some events of the original story remain – the raft, the river, the encounters with the conmen the Duke and the King, but others are replaced by scenes that reveal James’s cunning and intelligence. James is a reader and sneaks into Judge Thurber’s library to read Rosseau and Voltaire. He can write and begins recording his life story with a stolen pencil stub. Before running away, there is an ingenious scene where James is teaching the children of slaves how to speak in a way that won’t intimidate their white masters – putting all their language through a “slave filter” so their intelligence will stay under the radar of the whites. During these sessions he emphasizes that “the better they feel, the safer we are” which he has one of his fledglings translate to “da mo’bettah day feels, da mo safer we be.” Percival Everett elevates Twain’s story to a story that reveals the lived history of slaves. He empowers James with intelligence and language and agency. James is a hero who saves his wife and child and countless other slaves. A must read.
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7 people found this helpful
Kate Lutter
5
A Perfect and Heartwarming Companion to Huck Finn
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2024
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I am in awe of this book. As an ex English teacher who actually taught Huck Finn to high school juniors, I did not expect James to be the kind of book it is. It is ingenious and heartwarming and honest. Sure, it relies on the fact that James is a lot more sophisticated than he's let on, but that device serves the story. It is an action packed adventure with heart. I never read anything by Percival Everett before, but I am so glad I decided to read James. Don't get hung up on the small stuff--I'd say to readers--and just go with your heart. You will love this story.
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Eric Lee Smith
5
The Pencil
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2024
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As an alternative title, "The Pencil," works, perhaps even better than the given title, "James,” which, while better than "Tim," still underwhelms and asks no questions.
At first glance and upon guessing what the book will be about, I conjured the obvious, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view. Wrong. Such a refabrication practically writes itself, so why bother? The author has not; his premise starts as expected but then diverges in wild ways. Some of the scenes you expect do appear—the cave, the minstrel show—but transformed and reimagined, then augmented with new scenes that have no parallels in Twain's book.
So by calling it "The Pencil," it would give away part of the book's theme: the written word, books, and writing, their importance in general and in particular to the non-free. A man dies for a pencil in this book. In Twain? Nope. Literary writers often write books about language, meta-fiction that tells a story as an afterthought—not the case here. Language is a major theme in this book, but it serves the purpose of revealing what freedom actually means and how much it costs.
New characters appear too, some just for a scene and others for longer. Huck Finn appears but disappears, too, for chapters at a time, driving a parallel sub-plot and becoming a character mirror for Jim. Huck arrives as a deus ex machina, mucks about, makes some things better and other things worse, and then disappears to reappear later. It works.
The book also echoes Greek and Roman literature, and Jim's journey feels much like that of Odysseus, but I will not reveal more.
The book gallops along, driven by an abundance of dialog that echoes historical accents but is not dialect-trodden. The author delivers the voices of their time but does not reduce the book to farce. Touches of modern language also peer through out but do not jar the story.
Recommended.
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Alee
5
Masterful
Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2024
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What a wonderful,impactful retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective and context of Jim. The writing is wonderful,the story tracks with Twain just enough to give it a literary legitimacy,but the perspective of the narrator takes it to another level. A unique and clarifying vision of the slave/master relationship and the horror of a system that reduced human beings to animals in the eyes of other humans. I have recommended it to my grandchildren.
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3 people found this helpful
JMT
5
Brilliant.
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2024
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I have to first off admit that I have in fact not read the original Tales so this story wasn’t a retelling for me. Taking place right before the civil war started, it’s as expected, a harrowing tale full of atrocities bestowed upon slaves during that time. The way it’s written though tells a beautiful story of the resilience and perseverance of the main character, James, and his will to survive and save his family. Although it’s a bleak look into life before abolition, there are some funny and quirky moments that were just executed so perfectly that it brought some light to the story. I loved the relationships forged between James and different characters throughout the story, especially Huck. For me this book was just unputdownable and brilliant. Now, on to read the originals so I can get the full experience.
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5 people found this helpful
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