Percival Everett
Story Stream
The 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2025 January 22, 2025
Somehow, we’ve made it to the midpoint of the 2020s. The decade has been a great one for readers so far, with new classics like Percival Everett’s James and Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King winning awards and hitting bestseller lists. But 2025 ...
Percival Everett’s Great American Novel August 20, 2024
Mark Twain loved blackface. In his autobiography, a meandering hodgepodge of facts, feelings, and footnotes that was embargoed until recently, Twain paused on several occasions to laud minstrelsy, the racist cultural form that grossly lampooned the c...
Kierkegaard on the Mississippi July 08, 2024
KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. ...
Percival Everett on the Paintings He Makes July 05, 2024
J.C. Gabel Talks to the Acclaimed Novelist and Poet About His Latest Art Exhibition....
Tell and Tell Again: On Percival Everett’s “James” June 18, 2024
ACCORDING TO PERCIVAL EVERETT, at the root of almost everything he writes are “problems of logic.” “I’m interested in the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A,” he said in an interview with this magazine, “and even as I say it, it giv...
Percival Everett’s American Absurd April 25, 2024
On a recent tour of British bookshops, the American author Percival Everett visited Bath. He spent some time signing copies of his most recent book, James, in the independent bookshop Toppings, then went to do the same at another, Mr B’s Emporium, wh...
Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett April 12, 2024
Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read a...
The Duplicity of Percival Everett’s Literary Worlds April 08, 2024
The name of Percival Everett’s twelfth novel Erasure (2001), upon which last year’s American Fiction, the debut film by Cord Jefferson is based, is ambiguous in ways that may not immediately seem obvious. A whole industry exists to draw attention to ...
On Percival Everett’s “James” March 26, 2024
Catfish are omnivores. Mostly, they gobble worms, snakes, and shellfish, but are not averse to rodents and small fowl. They are the rare freshwater species of fish who can sustain an eat-or-be-eaten reciprocity with many of their predators. A single ...
Percival Everett's New Novel Is a Modern Classic March 25, 2024
James centers on a seminal character from American literature—and yet, seen afresh through the gaze of acclaimed writer Percival Everett, it’s as if we’re meeting him for the first time.Everett’s subject is Jim, the enslaved runaway from Mark Twain’s...
Percival Everett Can’t Be Pinned Down March 20, 2024
In February 2023, the news broke that Percival Everett would be publishing his 24th novel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, for an advance of more than $500,000. Some Everett devotees (myself inclu...
Under the Surface March 14, 2024
Percival Everett’s James is being marketed as a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but—in keeping with Everett’s history as a jazz musician—it’s more like an improvisation on Twain’s theme. In the original, considered by many to be the ...
A Bloody Retelling of 'Huckleberry Finn' March 13, 2024
Percival Everett’s new novel imagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved sidekick, Jim. But to call James a retelling would be an injustice. Everett sends Mark Twain’s classic through the looking glass. What emerge...
Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean March 12, 2024
In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story. Its author is silent as her classmates deliver gentle feedback. Some suggest minor improvements of pacing, setting, and...
A Conversation with Andrew Boryga March 05, 2024
This is an occasional series where I interview contemporary novelists of note. I had the pleasure of reading Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, which follows the trials of Javi, an aspiring writer who cynically exploits his working class Latino ide...
‘American Fiction’ and the Wet Eyes of the Sentimentalist February 20, 2024
We tell ourselves stories to feed our delusions. It’s an ugly world out there, and so many Americans prefer the easy way out. We genuflect to the guru and the influencer; we admire the charlatans who can captivate a crowd and turn a quick buck. We pr...
The Problem with 'American Fiction' February 07, 2024
Like many theatergoers and critics, I found much to admire in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. Having read Percival Everett’s Erasure several years before, I was excited to see how such a wonderfully acidic novel was adapted for the screen. And unl...
