HUCKLEBERRY & JAMES A BLACK PENCIL DRIVEN INTO AMERICA’S WOUND

As Trump’s America prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in 2026 — at the cost of a sweeping whitewash of its history — Huckleberry Finn returns to the spotlight in a new light. Novelist Percival Everett seizes Mark Twain’s foundational tale and “recenters” it: in James, he tells, in the first person, the story of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion. A masterstroke, crowned by the 2024 National Book Award and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize, James opens a window onto an America long obscured in Twain’s work.

One hundred and sixty years after the abolition of slavery, this subversive tale asks: what if “Black” and “white,” in the great maelstrom of ancestral mixing, no longer meant anything at all ? What if it all came down to social labels ? Retracing Huck and Jim–James’s 1,200-km journey down the Mississippi, Everett plunges us into America’s shadow zones, cutting against the tide of history on the march.