G&G’s Next Book Club Selection:
A New Novel Tangles with Twain

Photo: Michael Avedon

Percival Everett.

For its third book, G&G Reads has selected Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn from the escaped slave Jim’s perspective. “With James, Everett has mounted a high-stakes, revisionist raid not just on Twain’s imagination but on ours as a nation,” writes G&G contributing editor Jonathan Miles. 

“Jim, you may recall, served as the moral center of Twain’s 1884 novel, floating alongside young Huck on a picaresque raft voyage down the Mississippi. In James, he gets moved to the actual center, narrating those familiar events—the getaway to Jackson’s Island, the run-in with the duke and dauphin, etc.—as a ‘man… cognizant of his world, a man who has a family…who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.’”

The book is available to order here.

On Thursday, June 6, Everett will appear in conversation with Miles at the G&G offices in Charleston, South Carolina. Tickets are available here.

Members of G&G Reads will be able to submit questions for Everett and get exclusive access to a video of the conversation afterward. Sign up below (it’s free!).

In the meantime, check out Miles’s full review of the book here.

Join the Club

The rules for membership are simple—if you love Southern literature, you’re in. G&G Reads expands on the book coverage you already know and love in the pages of the magazine, highlighting the best of the South’s new books with exclusive author interviews, opportunities to ask your own questions, and insider conversations about the stories behind the stories.

Let us know how we can reach you to share all the details about our new club and upcoming conversations. No purchase is necessary to join the club.

Previous Selections and More Good Reads