In a new novel, Percival Everett offers a radically different perspective on the classic story “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Everett tells the story of Jim, who is escaping slavery; he calls his book “James.” “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in Huck Finn is simple.” Everett, whose 2001 novel “Erasure” was adapted as the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” restores Jim’s inner life as a father surviving enslavement, and forced to play along with the pranks of two white boys. But like other Black authors, including Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed, Everett considers Twain’s original a central American text grappling with slavery. “I imagine myself in a conversation with Twain doing this. And one of the things I think he and I would both agree on is that he doesn’t write Jim’s story because he’s not capable of writing Jim’s story—any more than I’m capable of writing Huck’s story.”
A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams
Singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun, Plus Bryan Washington
Dexter Filkins on the Dilemma at the Border
From “On the Media”: Seditious Conspiracy
The New York Times’ Publisher on the Future of Journalism, and the Poet Paul Tran
A Gay Russian, Exiled in Ireland
Should We, and Can We, Put the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence?
The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as “The Little Mermaid”
E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump, and Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis
Jill Lepore on the Joy of Gardening
Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks
How Climate Change Is Impacting Our Mental Health
Michael Schulman on the Writers’ Strike, and Samantha Irby with Doreen St. Félix
Germany’s Traumatized Kriegskinder Speak Out
Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich
King Charles III Takes the Throne
Harry Belafonte, the Pioneering Artist-Activist
The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens
The Bipartisan Effort to Rein in Presidential Military Power
Jane Mayer on Justice Clarence Thomas, and the Music Critic Hanif Abdurraqib on Concert Merch
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Should This Exist?
Without Fail
Hannibal Buress
Longform
Conversations