Poets & Writers Theater

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Percival Everett talks about how Mark Twain, among others, influenced the sense of irony in his writing and how a game of tennis impacted the premise of his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), for which he won the 2024 National Book Award in fiction.

In this NBC News video, New York Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks about assembling the newspaper’s recently released list of top 100 books of the twenty-first century with the help of a panel of novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and book lovers.

In this video, PBS Books and the American Library Association’s Booklist Reader editors recommend their top twelve books for this summer, which include James by Percival Everett (Doubleday, 2024), This Strange Eventful History (Norton, 2024) by Claire Messud, State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) by Laura van den Berg, and One of Our Kind (Knopf, 2024) by Nicola Yoon.

In this The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon video, the host reveals the return of the Fallon Book Club with a March Madness style bracket of sixteen books to vote for as a winner, including James (Doubleday, 2024) by Percival Everett, Wandering Stars (Knopf, 2024) by Tommy Orange, and Grief Is for People (MCD/FSG, 2024) by Sloane Crosley.

“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his new novel, James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.

In this Today Show video, Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts (Bloomsbury, 2022), recommends books to read for the coming year, including Erasure by Percival Everett, Anna O by Matthew Blake, and 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round by Jami Attenberg.

American Fiction is a film adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a satire about a frustrated Black author and professor who uses a pen name to write a successful book playing into racial stereotypes and tropes. Directed by Cord Jefferson, the film stars Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, and Sterling K. Brown.

“Artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing,” says Percival Everett in his acceptance speech for the 2024 National Book Award in fiction, which he won for his novel James (Doubleday, 2024).

Percival Everett, whose nineteenth novel, Assumption, will be published by Graywolf Press in November, discusses the role of art in society.