“I did fall in love with caves for a while. Caves are scary to us in the abstract; they’re dark, and there’s something in there. When you start going into caves, they’re unknown, and you keep looking back to see the light of the opening. Then something happens where you get deep enough into the cave, and you make friends with it. You don’t look at the entrance. You want to go deeper. I call it this area of interstitial tension, and that’s where art lives. When you hit, not a wall, but that space where everything turns around. That’s where I have to be to make the next book.”
-Percival Everett, episode 415 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Earlier this month, writer Percival Everett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for James, his subversive and singular reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
At the top, we discuss the philosophical problem that led to James (5:50), what repeated readings of Twain’s classic unlocked in Percival (7:56), the influence of his father’s sense of humor (16:20), how he arrived at writing growing up in South Carolina (19:40), and his relationship to the publishing industry, as depicted in Erasure and later the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (21:59).
On the back-half, we talk about teaching in the digital age (32:26), why Everett still assigns Blazing Saddles to his students (34:22), the “bad neighborhood” of his own mind (46:08), and what he’s chasing—or trying to excavate—each time he sits down to write (47:04).
This conversation was recorded live in Los Angeles in partnership with the Aspen Society.
If you’d like to come to our next live show, it will be Saturday, June 14th at the Tribeca Audio Festival in NYC with actor Sam Rockwell. Tickets here!
Thoughts, future guest ideas, or your favorite one-liner from this talk with Percival? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com.
Show-notes:
- Read Percival’s Pulitzer-winning novel James.
- Find more of his books: Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Dr. No, The Trees, So Much Blue, Telephone, and God’s Country.
- Watch the Oscar-winning film American Fiction.
- Learn about the Aspen Society, a community of engaged philanthropists whose annual support fuels the Aspen Institute’s mission—advancing bold solutions to critical challenges through leadership development, policy innovation, and meaningful dialogue.
- For more talks, hear our episodes with Jennifer Egan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, George Saunders, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
- Order your Talk Easy mug in cream and navy or our vinyl record with Fran Lebowitz.
Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi.
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