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. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Percival Everett is a giant of American letters, and JAMES is a canon-shatteringly great book. Unforgiving and compassionate, beautiful and brutal, a tragedy and a farce, this brilliant novel rewrites literary history to let us hear the voices it has long suppressed -- Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Trust</i> JAMES is funny and horrifying, brilliant and riveting. In telling the story of Jim instead of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett delivers a powerful, necessary corrective to both literature and history. I found myself cheering both the writer and his hero. Who should read this book? Every single person in the country -- Ann Patchett, bestselling author of <i>Tom Lake</i> Pure brilliance. Funny, wise, gracious; this may be Everett's best book yet -- Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of <i>Lessons in Chemistry</i> A scorchingly funny, action-packed reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- <i>The Sunday Times</i>, 'The 40 best books of 2024' Percival Everett is an audacious, beguiling American master, whose wild trajectory has reached astonishing highs in the past decade. Now comes JAMES, which enlists and devours not only Mark Twain’s novel but aspects of Melville, Ellison, and even Kafka to make an irrevocable invention into the canon. Everett is simply playing this game at a higher level, and it is the most serious game imaginable -- Jonathan Lethem, author of <i>Motherless Brooklyn</i> This is a brilliant, accessible, and very necessary companion to Huckleberry Finn -- Dave Eggers, bestselling author of <i>The Circle</i> [An] ingenious retelling of The Adverntures of Huckleberry Finn . . . Everett has outdone himself * Publishers Weekly * One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him * Kirkus Reviews * An absolutely essential read * Booklist *