Illustration: Doug Chayka/The Guardian
Fiction
James by Percival Everett
In this retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 Huckleberry Finn, narrated by escaped slave Jim, the reader is pulled along on a journey of picaresque adventures as helplessly as the two runaways on the Mississippi River – and for them it’s a matter of life and death. “My name is James,” the protagonist writes with a stub of stolen pencil. “I wrote myself into being.” This angry, exhilarating, entertaining novel has been hailed as a masterpiece to equal the original.
