James, by Percival Everett
Details
The results are in! The winner of our poll – and the book we will discuss on September 2, 2026 – is James, by Percival Everett. We used STAR Voting again this month, and twenty-four members voted in the poll. Of our four book choices, Atonement and James received the most stars in the scoring round and advanced to the automatic runoff round. The runoff round uses the information from the poll in a slightly different way: we compare the number of stars each member gave each of the finalists, and their vote goes to the book they gave more stars. Three people gave both finalists the same number of stars, Atonement received eight votes, and James received thirteen votes. Thank you to everyone who voted in our poll!
If you are a member of One Drink Minimum Book Club and didn't hear about the poll or otherwise have not been receiving Meetup messages, we have two suggestions. First, check your Meetup settings and make sure you have notifications from our book club enabled. If that doesn't solve the problem, our second suggestion is guaranteed to work! Send an email to Chris and Gary at one.drink.minimum.book@gmail.com and tell us your name on Meetup and the date you joined our book club (the extra info is so we can match our members to their email addresses). Once we verify your membership in Meetup, we'll be happy to add you to our gmail mailing list! Your email address will remain private as we send all messages blind cc.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more.
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.
When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
—description from the publisher Penguin Random House
“Using nuance and vulnerability to emphasize Jim’s humanity, [Everett leaves a] stamp on the literary landscape as he dismantles the stereotypes of the enslaved humans depicted in Twain’s classic. . . Percival Everett has accomplished more than humanizing a marginalized voice. He has, once again, delivered a seminal work of literary reparation.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Heir to Mark Twain’s satirical vision, Everett turns a boyhood memoir into a neo-fugitive slave narrative thriller. . . Using erasure, Everett has produced a daring emendation. Redacting swaths of Huck Finn, he’s revealed another code: the untranslated story of James’s self-emancipation. . . James is a provocative, enlightening work of literary art.”
—The Boston Globe
“[A] sly response to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. . . While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lampooned American society through the naiveté of its young narrator, James critiques White racism with the sharp insight of a character who’s felt the lash…What’s most striking, ultimately, is the way James both honors and interrogates Huck Finn, along with the nation that reveres it.”
—The Washington Post
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