Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Percival Everett used to be a writer deeply admired by critics, but a relatively small number of serious readers. I put it in the past tense, Everett is very much alive.

Because a year ago he published his twenty fourth novel, a book called James, and James just blew up. It won the National Book Award and last week it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Staff writer Julian Lucas is a very close reader of Percival Everett's novels. Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitiers, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sidney Poitiers movie, or or erasure about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym

To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the the prejudices and the assumptions uh and and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art. And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative. Julian Lucas talked with Percival Everett last year when the novel James had just come out. So I I love how this novel begins.

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