Retellings of novels like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield help to keep the canon alive<\/p>\n
It might have lost out at the Booker<\/a>, but James<\/a>, a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett<\/a>, was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction<\/a>. Everett retells Mark Twain\u2019s 1884 picaresque novel about a 13-year-old boy\u2019s escapades on the Mississippi from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Shocking, gripping and surprisingly comic, it\u2019s a bravura performance that celebrates and subverts the original.<\/p>\n Its success follows that of last year\u2019s Women\u2019s prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver<\/a>, a dazzling 550-page updating of Charles Dickens\u2019 David Copperfield transported to the author\u2019s home region of Appalachia during the 1990s opioid epidemic. As the supreme chronicler of social injustice, Dickens provided Kingsolver with \u201ca masterclass\u201d in how to use narrative to make readers care about a latter-day\u00a0underclass.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Retellings of novels like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield help to keep the canon alive It might have lost out at the Booker, but James, a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett, was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction. Everett retells Mark Twain\u2019s … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}