About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees, Dr. No and James. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

About James

With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.

James, the new novel by Percival Everett, is a brilliant, moving, harrowing and fearlessly funny reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of and in the voice of the enslaved Jim. With James, one of the US’s most respected, decorated and inventive novelists casts radical new light on a classic of American literature in a work of gripping urgency and lacerating humour.

1861, the Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans, and be 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, who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey, by raft, on the Mississippi River downward toward the elusive promise of the Free States and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he cannot protect and the constant lie he must live. Together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous odyssey of them all…

About Madhu Krishnan

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol and Director of the Centre for Black Humanities.

As well as working in academia, Madhu Krishnan is the author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She is at present working on a large scale project on literary activism in contemporary Africa, which explores the ways in which engagement with the literary functions as a mode of social production.

Percival Everett: James

The Trees

Erasure