Percival Everett, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, believes that book bans and censorship are telltale signs that fascism is on the rise in Donald Trump’s America. To save democracy, he says, ordinary, everyday citizens must stand and fight back.
Everett’s recommended acts of resistance? Getting a library card or joining a book club.
“Libraries are the seat of subversion,” Everett said in an interview with Augustin Trapenard, host of the French TV program La Grande Librairie. “Reading is the most subversive thing we can do in any culture.”
Reading with others, he said, is even better: “The second most subversive thing is being a part of a book club.”
Trapenard laughed a bit. Everett didn’t crack a smile.
The latest report from PEN America gives us an idea why Everett was deadly serious. PEN found that far-right national and local groups “have played on parents’ fears and anxieties to exert ideological control over public education.” That includes deciding what students can and can’t read.
PEN calls it an “Ed Scare” — a coordinated, sustained, far-right campaign to censor books, intimidate educators, and block students’ exposure to different ideas.
“Diverse ideas and stories featuring protagonists from historically marginalized identities are often the first topics targeted by censors,” according to PEN’s report. That means the first books in the line of fire “explore themes with race and racism, gender identity and sexuality, or depict sexual violence in their work.”
The scope is staggering. In the 2024–2025 school year alone, book bans targeted 3,752 unique titles across 87 districts nationwide. Florida led the country with 2,304 bans, enacted when elected officials and activist groups strong-armed teachers, schools, and districts.
Last year, Everett told the BBC that he hoped “James ”— his retelling of “Huckleberry Finn” through the eyes of Jim, the enslaved Black man, whom Mark Twain wrote as Huck’s stereotyped sidekick — would be banned, “only because I like irritating those people who do not think and read.”
The book earned him the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and finalist nods for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner. But Everett knows more than awards are at stake.
When Trapenard asked about Twain’s use of the N-word more than 200 times — which led it to vanish the original novel from classrooms in the U.S. and abroad — Everett answered that the right to read is — as his character James and real-life enslaved Black people knew too well — about freedom.
“When we read, we become critical. We’re open to ideas. We think,” he said. “And that’s what fascists do not want us to do. This is why fascists rush to burn books, to ban books. Very often, banning books that they don’t even understand.”
Language, Everett said, defines the line between freedom and submission.
“Language is our place of safety,” he said. “Language is what keeps us free. If we can’t communicate with each other, if we can’t impart ideas, then we might as well give up.”