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Community reading program

This year’s One Book. . . One Campus. . . One Community selection is “James,” a new novel by Percival Everett, an inventive, exciting, troubling, and very funny retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a book that Hemingway claimed was the source of all modern American literature. A review of Everett’s novel calls it “an essential companion piece to the original novel, so much so that you can’t imagine ever again reading one without the other.”

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.

The Teams page will allow participants to share their thoughts on the readings with other participants. Discussion on a variety of topics relating to the book will be held in HH200 (see schedule below). However, if you are unable to join the meetings in person (or online), you may still contribute comments or questions to that week’s discussion, using Teams. Participants may also share relevant links or articles that may add to the conversation. Just add your comments or questions to that week’s readings to start a conversation with other participants.

Contact Doug Swartz to be added to the One Book Teams page: dswartz@iu.edu

Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as “pathologically ironic” and has played around with numerous genres such as Western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire, and philosophical fiction.

Everett has often been described as an “underappreciated” talent and a “writer’s writer.” His longtime editor and publisher, Fiona McCrae, has suggested that the variety of his work, which is difficult to define, might account for why he has been slow to receive widespread recognition. But in the 21st century, Everett began to receive significant recognition for his work, starting with his novel “Telephone” (2020), which was released in three separate editions featuring different endings and was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Upon the novel’s publication, McCrae told The New York Times that a larger audience had learned to appreciate Everett for exactly the quality that had at first caused him to be overlooked. His work’s inability to be easily defined had become “the very thing that people marvel at.”

Everett has served as fiction editor for “Callaloo,” a prominent arts-and-culture journal of the African diaspora. His short-story collections include “Big Picture” (1996) and “Half an Inch of Water” (2015). In 2006 he published the poetry collection “re: f (gesture),” followed by “Swimming Swimmers Swimming” (2011) and “Trout’s Lie” (2015).

Among his other honors are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2014 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2015. In 2021, he also received the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.