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

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Percival Everett used to be a writer, deeply admired by critics, but a relatively small number of serious readers.

I put it in the past tense, Everett is very much alive,

because a year ago he published his 24th novel,

a book called James, and James just blew up.

It won the National Book Award,

and last week it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Staff writer Julian Lucas is a very close reader of Percival Everett's novels.

Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the

plot of basically every Sydney 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.

Julian Lucas talked with Percival Everett last year when the novel James had just come out.

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 more derogatory epitets, 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. Okay, see if I can get close here.

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them so I could see them as plain as day,

though it was deep night.

Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas.

...