Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today's a big day on the pod. We've got author

Percival Everett. If you don't know his work, you might have heard his name recently. His 2001 book

erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie American fiction. But we are, of course, a books podcast.

And let's just do a quick review of the types of books

ever it writes. We can work backwards here, looking at his most recent ones. Last year,

he wrote Dr. No, a James Bond parody. That's also a philosophical inquiry into the concept

of nothingness. Before that, he wrote The Trees, which was a thriller slash comedy about the history of lynching.

And before that, he wrote Telephone, which was about loss and grief, and also happened to be

secretly three different books, all of which to say he's prolific and ambitious.

His new book is a retelling of the Mark Twain classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I did read the novel some 15 times in a row so that I could be sick of it, so that I could

lose it. I didn't want to, you know, regurgitate the scenes, which are fairly remarkable and entertaining. So I had to own the material,

and my way of doing that was to read it until it became nonsense. It's titled James,

and it tells the story through the eyes of Jim, Huck's friend, escaping slavery. We talk about

the book, The Pushes to Censor Huck Finn, and how he doesn't love doing press.

That's ahead.

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Parcalford, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, thank you for having me.

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