Huckleberry Jim (Hardcover)

Hardcover. A darkly funny 1991 road novel about two actors touring a stripped-down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America - publishing during Banned Books Week, in the year of America's Semiquincentennial, and the 150th anniversary of Tom Sawyer.Axel Emerson isn't chasing a dream - he's running from a body. After the sudden death of his estranged father, and the detective's calls that follow, a washed-up casting agent offers him an exit: tour the schools as Huck Finn in a stripped-down, two-man stage version of the American classic. It's 1991, and the country is cracking open.His co-star is Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor cast as Jim - and from the first moment, Moses sees straight through him. Their road trip through hostile American towns becomes a crash course in race, history, and performative ignorance, recited from lines a white man wrote in 1884 about a country that hasn't changed as much as it thinks. When performance and reality finally collide, there's no script left to hide behind.A Publishers Weekly Booklife Editors Pick, Huckleberry Jim is a reckoning with race, guilt, and the bedtime stories America tells itself to sleep at night. For readers of Percival Everett's James and Paul Beatty's The Sellout. Two actors try to hold a children's tour of Huckleberry Finn together, while the country tries to tear them apart. 1991, based on real events. A darkly funny reckoning with race, performance & the bedtime stories America still tells itself This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.