July 14: James

We’ll depart from our usual craft book selection and discuss James by Percival Everett. Published in 2024, this Pulitzer Prize winner is “A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view” (Penguin Random House).

Interest in this title surfaced during our recent discussion of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, which critiques several American works, including Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She expands how we read the novel by asking: How does the book use race to produce meaning, identity, and moral drama? Huck’s companion on his journey, Jim, enables Huck’s transformation—but doesn’t receive equivalent narrative depth, for example. The novel is powerful in its critique of slavery and limited in that it doesn’t fully imagine Black autonomy or subjectivity.

Please join us to discuss this powerful reframing of Twain’s classic. We’ll gather via zoom at 7:30 p.m. Eastern/6:30 p.m. Central and will meet for about an hour. Sign up for the reminder emails with all the details below.