Joseph-Beth Booksellers in partnership with The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center presents Percival Everett
March 29 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Book Purchase required
Joseph-Beth Booksellers, in partnership with The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, presents Percival Everett with Yalie Saweda Kamara.
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, THE SEATTLE TIMES, ELLE, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, AND OPRAH DAILY
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Pulitzer Prize finalist Percival Everett’s novel Erasure becomes the foundation for Cord Jefferson’s critically acclaimed film American Fiction.
“If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read James, by Percival Everett”
The Washington Post
Tickets
This is a ticketed event (book = ticket). Purchase the book below to attend the event. The price includes one person’s entry to the event, and one signed copy of James by Percival Everett.
About the Novel
Fearing eternal separation from his wife and daughter, Jim, an enslaved man, hides on Jackson Island after overhearing news of his impending sale to someone in New Orleans.
Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his death to escape his violent father, who recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, this is the dangerous and transcendent journey by rafting 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.
Percival Everett electrifies readers with his humor and insightful observations. Percival Everett’s novel James positions itself as a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature. (Oprah Daily hails Everett as a “literary icon” and one of the most decorated writers of our time.)
About the Authors
Percival Everett
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on Erasure’s novel, was released in 2023. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
Yalie Saweda Kamara
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term) and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration and the author of the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name and When the Living Sing.
Kamara earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.
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