Workhouse Editions
October 2026
On Sale: October 6, 2026
Featuring: Axel Emerson; Huck Finn
234 pages ISBN: B0H9PBMGBJ EAN: 9798996345038 Kindle: B0HH4V18Q3 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
A darkly funny 1991 road novel about two actors touring a stripped‑down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America, publishing during Banned Books Week, in the year of America's Semiquincentennial, and the 150th anniversary of Tom Sawyer.
Axel Emerson isn't chasing a dream ‑ he's running from a body. After the sudden death of his estranged father, and the detective's calls that follow, a washed‑up casting agent offers him an exit: tour the schools as Huck Finn in a stripped‑down, two‑man stage version of the American classic. It's 1991, and the country is cracking open. His co‑star is Moses Morton, a fifty‑five‑year‑old Black actor cast as Jim, and from the first moment, Moses sees straight through him.
Their road trip through hostile American towns becomes a crash course in race, history, and performative ignorance, recited from lines a white man wrote in 1884 about a country that hasn't changed as much as it thinks. When performance and reality finally collide, there's no script left to hide behind.
Darkly funny and unflinching, Huckleberry Jim is a reckoning with race, guilt, and the bedtime stories America tells itself to sleep at night.
For readers of Percival Everett's James and Paul Beatty's The Sellout.
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