Title:: [[James]] Authors:: [[Percival Everett]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2024-03-24]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/jeronimo_ficus/p/C46RKj2PUfn/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[Doubleday]], 2024 - Original Copyright:: 2024 - Pages:: 303 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9780385550369 ## Annotations “It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped out into the yard and called out into the night.” - Jim, last sentence of the first page of James “Once you’ve attracted a reader with what they think they want, you can get them hooked on what you have.” - author Maya Binyam paraphrasing Everett comparing fishing to writing (from her recent New Yorker profile of Everett) This was not the book I think it could have been. The potential feels neutered and commodified into that growing corner of publishing that’s cat nip for the mostly white, mostly progressive, mostly well-off reader for whom reading is less a political act than a performative one.  Is this Everett adapting Monk’s conceit from Erasure? Maybe, but doubt it. This is Everett’s first with Doubleday, and I wonder if this book reads differently if it came from Graywolf or another smaller publisher. I thought even the blurbs on the back protested too much (the word canon is mentioned in two separate blurbs, smh).  To be sure, it has its moments and wit, but overall I was disappointed. This bums me out.