National Book Award 2024 For Fiction To James By Percival Everett
Yesterday the National Book Awards 2024 announced the winners. Percival Everett's novel James has won the award for fiction by retelling Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
Everett whose previous novel Erasure has been turned into the Oscar-winning comedy American Fiction last year, triumphed this year over his fellow finalists with another version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His novel was also among the finalist of 2024 Booker Prize as well as won Kirkus Prize for Fiction
James reworks Mark Twain's masperpiece by telling a story from original lead friend Jim's, an escaped slave's, perspective. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
The award for best nonfiction went to Jason De León's Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, for translated literature to Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taivan Travelogue, for young people's literature to - Shifa Saltagi Safadi's Kareem Between, and for poetry to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Something About Living.
