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

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.”