This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

The novelist Percival Everett has been getting a lot of attention lately,

including a profile in the New Yorker.

His novel Erasure was made into the film American Fiction,

which just won an Oscar for its screenplay and he

has a new novel out, his 24th. Staff writer Julian Lucas is fascinated by Percival Everett's

work.

Whether it's his novel, I am not Sidney Poitier

about a character who ends up stuck in the plot

of basically every Sidney Poitier movie or erasure about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing

in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym.

To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions

and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art.

And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn, I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative,

but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative.

Everett's book is called James.

Here's Julian Lucas talking with Percival Everett.

So I love how this novel begins. I mean first of all the title because in

Twain we know this character as Jim or you know sometimes as as more derogatory epithets but immediately he's announced as James

and the reframing you do is just so clear in the very first sentence and I wonder if you could read for us the

first page of the novel. See if I can get close here.

...