Book Club: September 8, 2025, 2-4pm, – Fellows and External Fellows

September 8, 2025, 2-4 pm – Fellows and External Fellows

James by Percival Everett (2024)

Discussion Leader: Meg Fox

“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” writes James. The escaped slave who accompanied Huck downriver on a raft in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim is brilliantly reconceived as a highly intelligent and literate man in this 2025 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel. Even James uses the familiar slave-talk around whites, but in private the slaves speak standard English and James teaches a group of children “the correct incorrect grammar” to maintain the illusion of white superiority: “The better they feel, the safer we are.” He has read many books from Judge Thatcher’s library, and on his dangerous journey down the Mississippi to purchase the freedom of his wife and daughter, he converses with Voltaire on morality in a delirium after a rattlesnake bite and challenges John Locke on his hypocrisy. Everett thus explores language as performance and power, but shows that for the enslaved, words may not be enough: many adventures brought forward in James are grimmer than those on the same route in Huck Finn, as legal rape and murder of slaves were commonplace. Yet somehow irony and the deepening bond with Huck remain at the heart of James’s narrative until near the end of this great read. (Available in all formats; 303 pages)

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/0WiGkxhWEy

The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Mary Jane Ashley at maryjane.ashley@utoronto.ca.