Diversity Book Club 12pm James by Percival Everett

James   by Percival Everett

October 19: James is a re-imagination of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s enslaved companion on their raft-ride down the Mississippi River.

The St. James’ Diversity Book Club will launch the Fall 2025 season with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel James by Percival Everett.

The discussion will be held at noon on Oct. 19 in the Toppie Bates Lakeside Room. The discussions are free and open to everyone, even if you have not read the book. Light refreshments will be served. James is a re-imagination of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s enslaved companion on their raft-ride down the Mississippi River. In Everett’s re-imagining, James’ “agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.” “James is a surgical disarticulation of the bones that hold American racialism in place— more than physiognomy, our language has been shaped to keep us apart. James extols the virtues of literacy, self-naming, entelechy, and freedom, while showing us that these virtues mean little if they are expressed merely for the self. The protagonist carries us to a greener territory, a new world, where signifying is for beauty’s sake—never again because of the whip” (National Book Foundation website). Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His award-winning novels include The Trees (2021) and Erasure (2001), which was adapted as the Academy Award winning film American Fiction in 2023.