James by Percival Everett Wins the Pulitzer Prize

And I, for one, am not emotionally equipped to be this impressed

There are times when a book wins a major prize and you think, “Ah, yes. That one. Fine.” And then there are times, rare, fizzy, soul-restoring times, when a book wins and you sit back and think, “Yes. Of course. Thank you, universe. Thank you, literary gods. Thank you to the small, exhausted committee with far too many screeners and not enough biscuits.”

This year, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has gone to James by Percival Everett and frankly, it deserves fireworks, fanfares, and a small commemorative statue in every public library.

Because James is not just good. It’s urgent, brilliant, radical in its restraint and slyness, and somehow, magically, funny and devastating at the same time. It’s the kind of book that whispers something dangerous and beautiful in your ear and then vanishes, leaving scorch marks and questions.

So, what is James?
At first glance, it’s a retelling. Everett takes the bones of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – that often-assigned, often-misunderstood classic and reimagines the story from the point of view of Jim. You know, Jim: the enslaved man who helped Huck escape, who spoke in caricatured dialect, who was rarely allowed interiority, intellect, or agency.

In James, Everett hands him all of it.
This is Jim as we’ve never met him before: literate, wry, fiercely observant, and often dangerously brilliant. He speaks one way in public, slipping into the expected, broken dialect of the enslaved. But privately, within his own mind, he reads Voltaire and Rousseau, debates ethics, and plots his own way forward through a landscape designed to silence him.

And because this is Everett, nothing is done bluntly. The satire is surgical. The language is clean, sly, often jaw-dropping in its precision. There are passages you want to tattoo on your brain. Lines like:
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me... It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”

This is not just a novel that “gives voice” to a marginalized character. It is a novel that dares to rewire the American canon by showing just how arbitrary, and how destructive, our literary hierarchies have been. It says: You called this freedom? Let me show you survival. You called this adventure? Let me show you intellect, strategy, pain.
And it does so without a shred of pity. Just power.

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Who is Percival Everett?

If you’ve somehow missed Everett’s work until now, welcome. Please get comfortable. Bring tea. He’s one of the most consistently fascinating and category-defying American writers of the past thirty years. A Distinguished Professor of English at USC, Everett has written everything from satire (Erasure, which became the Oscar-winning film American Fiction) to Westerns, experimental novels, absurdist comedies, and mythic rewrites. He is both a trickster and a technician like if Borges had a biting sense of humor and a raised eyebrow at every genre convention.

James might be his most accessible novel, but it is by no means his simplest. What it achieves in 300 pages is what some careers struggle to. It interrogates Twain, race, language, agency, silence, storytelling itself.

What are the critics saying?

The New York Times called James “Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful,” noting. “Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being.”Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling James himself “one of the noblest characters in American literature” and the book a novel finally worthy of him. The Guardian called it “a philosophical picaresque,” “page-turning,” and “piercingly smart,” which is how I hope someone will one day describe me but probably won’t.

And let’s not forget what the Pulitzer Prize board itself said. They called James:
“An accomplished reconsideration of Huckleberry Finn that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.”

Reader, when the prize committee is in sync with your own wild admiration, it’s deeply validating.

Why does James matter?

Because literary history, like real history, has often been written by those with power. Because re-reading is a radical act. Because when someone takes a character that was denied full personhood and rebuilds him with such intelligence, dignity, fury, and grace, it is not just art, it is repair.
And because James is also just extraordinarily good reading. It is unputdownable in the old-school, I-missed-my-bus-stop sense. It crackles. It stings. It makes you laugh when you probably shouldn’t. It moves at the pace of myth, but it hums with contemporary urgency.

“I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves 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.”

That’s James. And that’s why it matters.

Buy it. Borrow it. Recommend it. Leave it casually on the coffee table for your cousin who only reads business books. Annotate it wildly. Gift it to your cleverest friend. Read it twice.
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to a book that is not just a rewriting, but a reclaiming.

Not just clever, but necessary. Not just moving, but unforgettable.
Thank you, Percival Everett. And thank you, James, for being the kind of character, and the kind of voice, we’ve been waiting far too long to hear properly.