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Percival Everett won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his novel James, a modern masterpiece that retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. On this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read, Jeff and Rebecca discuss what Everett does with Jim’s interiority and intelligence that Twain couldn’t, how the novel’s central conceit literalizes W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, and how Everett pulled off making a book that is layered and intellectually rich into a genuine page-turner.
In this companion piece to the episode, I’m sharing some Percival Everett trivia and interviews, some book awards tea, recs for retellings where side characters step to the front, and more.
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In Reading Color
A weekly newsletter focusing on literature by and about people of color!
Fun Facts
- Percival Everett got the idea to write James story while playing tennis.
- Everett teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California (USC)
- Yours truly (Vanessa) went to USC (Fight on! ✌🏼), but studied business after first declaring pre-med for make-immigrant-parents-proud reasons and realizing that was a mistake.
- I’d almost certainly have wound up in one of Everett’s Intro to Fiction Writing courses if I’d actually decided to pursue writing back then, and share Rebecca’s absolute terror of having my silly little stories graded by the man.
- The man contains multitudes: he worked for 12 years training horses and mules, is an avid fly-fisher and woodworker, repairs musical instruments, and plays jazz guitar, all while teaching and writing literary masterpieces.
Book Award Trivia (and Tea!)
- James is one of only eight novels to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The others are:
- Thomas Pynchon almost made this illustrious list, and the reason why he didn’t is a minor scandal.
- In 1974, he won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
- He would have won the Pulitzer—it was unanimously recommended by the three members of the fiction prize committee.
- At the last minute, the Pulitzer Advisory Board rejected their nomination, calling the book “unreadable,” “turgid,” and “obscene,” and then decided not to award the fiction prize at all that year. Escandalo!
- Pynchon’s Vineland is the basis for the Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another. You can listen to our episode on the novel here.
Out of Context Show Quotes
- “He knows that we know, or he knows that we think we know. ”
- Me, who grew up on MTV programming: “This is the diary of Percival Everett.”
- “Penelope, if you don’t know, is Odysseus’ wife, who has spent 20 years keeping dudes at bay through trickeration and frankly, men not understanding textile arts.”
Side Characters to the Front
The setup of James is one of my personal brands of fiction catnip: retellings told from the POV of a side character, or even just a different main character, from the source material. Here are (more than) a few of my favorites.
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: The story of the Trojan War and Achilles through the eyes of Patroclus (warning: have tissues on hand for this one). See also: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (told by Briseis, the queen Achilles takes captive) and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (told by the women on both sides of the Trojan war)
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: A remix on Jane Eyre told through the POV of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s wife—AKA the “madwoman in the attic”
- Beautiful Villain by Rebecca F. Kenney: A vampiric retelling of The Great Gatsby told from Daisy’s perspective
- Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid: A gothic, brooding story of the “what if the woman from this well-known story was branded as wicked to excuse the wickedness of a man?” variety, loosely based on Macbeth
- March by Geraldine Brooks: A take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, retells the story from Mr. March’s point of view
- I, Tituba by Maryse Condé: This isn’t a retelling of a fictional work, but a fictional account of a historical event told from the POV of a person typically left out of the narrative. In this case, that person is Tituba, the enslaved woman who was among the first people to be accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials
- The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood – I am not going to describe this better than Jeff did in the “out of context show quotes” section.
Quotables
James is full of some great quotes on everything from the act of reading to the plight of the Black person surviving in a racist society. Here are a couple of standouts:
- “At that moment, the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and therefore completely subversive.”
- “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”
- “How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”
- “Luke chuckled. So when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?”
Adaptations
In 2024, it was announced that Stephen Spielberg would executive produce an adaptation of James, with Taika Waititi tentatively named as director. That was a while ago, and we haven’t heard much in the way of casting or anything else since. Adapting any work is an undertaking. Adapting this work? That is a project, one that needs to be handled with care and discretion. I share Rebecca’s nervousness – I am that worried Kermit meme all over again.
The good news is that Everett himself is set to write the screenplay and will also serve as an executive producer. Fingers crossed, breath held!
Extra Credit
Readalikes and Such
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court for trying to reinstate slavery and segregation. The book contains a Huck Finn plot point: a character wrestles with the N-word in Huck Finn, and their solution is to change every appearance of it in the book with a “race-sensitive” word
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The central conceit of this award-winning novel is that the Underground Railroad, via a touch of magical realism, was a real train railroad and not just a metaphor.
Supplemental Reading (and Watching/Listening)
- This YouTube clip features Percival Everett discussing the anti-intellectualism he’s observed in American students. The clip is over 15 years old, but every time I hop on social media and see a younger generation of readers resisting reading difficult texts, I want to send it to them.
- LeVar Burton used to host a wonderful podcast called LeVar Burton Reads, a show dedicated to short stories hand-picked and then performed by Burton himself. The show, to the best of my knowledge, concluded in 2024, and one of the last stories covered was Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures.” The story of a young Black musician who’s heckled by a group of white fraternity brothers first appeared in Everett’s 2014 story collection, Damned If I Do.
- Dua Lipa consistently impresses me with the book selections, interviews, and insights shared in her Service95 Book Club. In her September 2025 interview with Percival Everett, the pair discussed Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees.
- The singer read the title in 2022 when she tackled the entire Book Prize shortlist after being asked to speak at the award ceremony.
- She describes the book as “classic Percival: wickedly funny, deeply affecting, and always one step ahead of your expectations.”
- A quote from the interview: “You know, it would be great to write a novel that everyone hated… what kind of power would that be! That’s be fasntastic!” Sorry, Mr. Everett. The odds are not in your favor there.
- ICYMI: Everett’s acceptance speech for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. It’s gracious, it’s funny, it goes in on AI, and in spite of the state of the world, it is beautifully, defiantly hopeful.