Books & Bookmen
FOR HUCK’S SAKE
n JAMES, Percival Everett’s Jim-centric reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has taken the Pulitzer prize for fiction, though only after a kerfuffle at New York’s Columbia University.
It appears – the selection process is opaque – that judges chose an all-female trio of fiction finalists, but the overseeing board at Columbia insisted they must add Everett, with the clear implication he should win. They may have done this because (a) it was clearly last year’s best novel, and not picking it was perverse; or (b) because Columbia – currently in the firing line in Trump’s attack on Ivy League wokeism – wanted to make a defiant statement about diversity.