Percival Everett’s ‘James’ is a finalist for Carnegie Medal for fiction

By The Associated Press on November 12, 2024.

FILE - Author Percival Everett appears at a screening of the film, "American Fiction" on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

NEW YORK (AP) – Percival Everett’s “James” has received yet another literary nomination. Everett’s reworking of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is among the finalists for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, $5,000 honors for fiction and nonfiction presented by the American Library Association.

“James” already is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize and has won the Kirkus Prize for fiction. One of the Carnegie nominees for nonfiction is Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” the Kirkus winner for nonfiction.

On Tuesday, the library association announced that the other Carnegie fiction nominees are a pair of debut novels: Jiaming Tang’s “Cinema Love” and Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”, which is also a National Book Award finalist.

Besides “Challenger,” the Carnegie nonfiction nominees are Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” and Kevin Fedarko’s “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.”

Winners will be announced Jan. 26. The medals were established in 2012, with previous recipients including Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan and Higginbotham, who won in 2020 for “Midnight in Chernobyl.”