Angela Ajayi | (TNS) Star Tribune Everyone should know the name Percival Everett by now. His “Also by Percival Everett” lists read like discographies, revealing more than 30 novels with resonant, sometimes playful titles such as “The Trees,” a Booker Prize contender, or “Dr. No,” published by Graywolf Press. Movie “American Fiction,” which just won a screenplay Oscar, is based on his 2001 satire “Erasure.” His latest, “James,” also playful and resonant, is a rewrite of a deeply controversial classic, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Today, the novel’s use of racially charged language rattles us. One epithet appears more than 200 times in the unsanitized text. (At some point, an attempt was made to replace the word with “slave.”) Among other offenses are its derogatory depictions of the enslaved Jim, who is rendered illiterate and mostly unintelligible in colloquial speech. Accusations of minstrelsy have also been rightly lobbed at Twain. Where others might see an exercise in humiliation and vexation, Everett, who is Black, sees an opportunity for re-education and redress. In his straightforward, easy-prose rewrite of “Finn,” Everett grants us immediate access to that familiar