The 2025 Championship
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 31 • CHAMPIONSHIP
Martyr!
v. James
In the championship match, all of this year’s judges read both finalists, vote for one to win, and briefly tell us how they made their choice. Here are their verdicts.
Hannah Bonner
Both James and Martyr! are ambitious in their scope and deftly rendered, but while Percival Everett’s James is a fascinating rewriting of Jim's narrative in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I ultimately find the language to be more lyrical in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and the narrative more richly textured. Though the narrative squarely belongs to protagonist Cyrus Shama in Martyr!, Akbar also explores the interiority of his parents, his uncle, and his mother's spouse. Thus, Martyr! becomes a scintillating kaleidoscope of perspectives that each offer new ways of thinking about, and understanding, art, identity, and mortality. (Full disclosure: Akbar is one of my supervisors at the University of Iowa, but only as someone to go to if I have questions about a student.)
Martyr! 1 ⏤ James 0
Aditi Khorana
I was tasked with judging these two novels side by side in the semifinals, so I’m not surprised they both soared into the championship. Everett’s skillful exploration of the construction of racial identity in James and its playfulness with language and code-switching make for a sublime read, but even weeks later, I find myself thinking about Martyr!’s wayward and glum protagonist. Both books masterfully explore the ways language creates and mediates the social order and acts as a tool to include, exclude, imprison, build esteem, and something else too—offers freedom from oppression—both personal and historic. Both novels wove these themes into narrative so deftly, I could practically feel the neurons firing in my brain as I read. But it was Martyr!, in the end, that sparkled with originality and surprising humor. Reading it was as transcendent as I imagined it would be to glance upon those mirrored mosaics of the Safavids. Like touching the edge of something electric. It’s Martyr! all the way for me.
Martyr! 2 ⏤ James 0
Alena Saunders
For me, it’s James. James has everything I love in a book: incredible writing, gripping story, wit and humor, sadness and grief. Just a very moving experience, reading this book. But also I just admire it. What an endeavor! Rewriting one of the classics, while simultaneously creating a separate, standalone piece of art in the process? And to pull it off? Pull it off and also it is an amazing read? A true accomplishment.
Martyr! 2 ⏤ James 1
Sammy Loren
This was not even close, though I wanted it to be. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! features many of my favorite topics: poets, addicts, death. And Akbar illuminates the toxic cycles of addiction with much poetry. But Percival Everett’s James is quite literally addictive. I could not put the book down. It’s all the things great fiction should be: provocative, hilarious, propulsive, tender. There were times where too much online discourse slipped into a book set in 1861, but overall James slaps until the final sentence. Like James himself, I too felt reborn by its end.
Martyr! 2 ⏤ James 2
Stephen Kearse
This is a great matchup. Martyr! and James both take classic forms—the picaresque, the kunstlerroman—and get super freaky with history, language, and structure. Akbar and Everett are master tricksters. But I think James better harnesses all the absurdity and friction it generates, a focus that produces sharper storytelling. The baggier, more meandering-approach Martyr! is pleasant, but not as affecting. I found myself admiring the construction of sentences and the architecture of the narrative more than experiencing them, feeling them, the way I did with James.
Martyr! 2 ⏤ James 3
Nicholas Glastonbury
I had a feeling, when I first saw the shortlist, that these would be the Tournament’s finalists, and boy, they did not disappoint. What beauty and what terror. Two ambitious books, two protagonists writing themselves into life. Metatexts, double consciousness, oneiric encounters, the deceptions of names, the trouble of kin, the evil rot at the heart of the American enterprise. But if I must choose (and they tell me I must), then for its propulsive acerbity, its acrobatics of language, its sheer humanity, I choose Martyr! In this time of martyrs, I revere the grace and glory of this book.
Martyr! 3 ⏤ James 3
Michael David Lukas
We can’t help but bring our full selves to the books we read. Which is what makes projects like the ToB interesting. A lot of readers I admire loved Martyr! And many of them particularly praised the voice of its charming recovering-alcoholic narrator, Cyrus Shams. As someone who grew up surrounded by people in and out of AA, that charm felt tired and at times borderline toxic. James, on the other hand, was pitch-perfect throughout. Percival Everett is a master, one of our greats. With James, he pulled off a seemingly impossible feat: He stayed true to the source, while creating an entirely separate work that is vital, surprising, and profound.
Martyr! 3 ⏤ James 4
Meher Manda
What an honor to read Martyr! and James in the final round of this year's Tournament of Books. To have the company of these two great writers in tandem, in succession, in dialogue, as the predatorial America of Everett’s incisive take on Mark Twain's Huck Finn is reborn as the all-swallowing superpower in Akbar's treatise on martyrdom. I was moved by the anger in James, and the proleptic tragedy of its hero’s journey. Only for me, Martyr! read like a book brimming forth with urgency, destined to be its author’s work now, in this rush of disquietude. I was swayed by the book’s expansion into surreal territories, in its embrace of perspectives, testimonies, and fabrications, in its naked admission that all art comes at a heavy price, and only death made meaningful can be meaningful death. A work staggeringly aware of the limitations of its kind, I will revisit Martyr! for years to come.
Martyr! 4 ⏤ James 4
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Hannah Utt
I hate this decision. I loved these books equally for different reasons. The familiarity of the plot in James, the fact that it still read like an adventure, and the simple elegance of the language carried me through the book’s gut-wrenching themes and allowed them to sort of seep into me. Martyr!, in contrast, felt so entirely original and contemporary that I was very aware of how it was affecting me as I read. I think in the end, I was more impressed by Martyr! but more inspired by James?!
Martyr! 4 ⏤ James 5
Ivy Pochoda
What remains when you turn the last page? What stays with you? What haunts you? What can't you get out of your head? In the case of both James and Martyr!, quite a lot. These books are unforgettable, pioneering. They are madly inventive—experimental at times. Daring and ambitious. Both are linguistically virtuosic. And funny, especially when humor is unexpected. And yet—the wildness of Martyr! The impossibility of its many parts coming into concert has clawed into my brain, taken root. The book seems to be a prism—a panorama—something that demands examination from various angles and that might change depending upon which facet you concentrate on. It's a marvel. And a winner.
Martyr! 5 ⏤ James 5
Jean Chen Ho
I chose Martyr! to win in my previous round and I’m glad to see it made the championship round. This is such a special book, full of laughter and forgiveness and dreams and sex. I’m voting for it to win over James—Percival Everett’s genius exceeds genre conventions, but I must admit I prefer his “realist” fiction (So Much Blue, for example) and the more sincerely drawn elements of his satirical writing. I want CHARACTERS. I want interiority! And though we’re in first-person POV throughout James, our titular protagonist remained a bit of a cipher to me (“I am James,” he says in the final chapter. “Just James.”). Both novels offer up a Big Family Secret in the second half that is meant to reorient the reader’s understanding of everything that came before, but I thought the polyphonic formal experimentations in Martyr! created a more expansive, beautifully devastating resonance for the consequences of the secret’s revealing.
Martyr! 6 ⏤ James 5
Bobuq Sayed
Akbar's razor-sharp attention to character had my heartstrings curled around his prose, truly enamored. Both books showcased a great skill with propulsive suspense, restraint, and richly textured detail, but ultimately I felt the world of Martyr! was easier for me to inhabit and delight in, especially with reference to its perhaps more complex representation of women.
Martyr! 7 ⏤ James 5
Max Read
It's James for me. I'll confess: I didn't wholeheartedly love either of these books, even if I could appreciate both of them. Martyr! is an incredibly impressive debut, but sometimes felt overstuffed and underbaked, its characters artificially articulate and always perfectly positioned to voice whatever (beautiful! lyrical!) sentiments Akbar sought to communicate. And while I love a metafictional adventure through American history and literature, I felt ambivalent about the code-switching conceit of James—a conceit that seems to rely on the debatable proposition that there's no intelligence or richness in Twain's Jim's speech. But in the end, James enraptured me more than Martyr!, and I prefer a book I disagree with to one I sometimes roll my eyes at.
Martyr! 7 ⏤ James 6
Emily Hughes
It’s Martyr! for me. James is wonderful and Everett is a tremendous writer, but there’s a brightness about Akbar’s novel that I keep flashing back to, a precarious balance of generosity, clarity, and a willingness to meet his characters where they are without passing judgment or making excuses. It’s full of lines that stopped me dead in my tracks, such as “the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.” What it comes down to, ultimately, is that James lives in my head, but Martyr! lives in my heart.
Martyr! 8 ⏤ James 6
Molly Templeton
I'm hung up on the unexpected details these two books have in common: the sly parental revelations, the imagined conversations with historical and fictional figures. On any given day I might be convinced to lean either way with this choice between two books whose successes in the Tournament feel both inevitable and refreshing, somehow. But it's still James for me. Martyr! has its moments of transcendence, but James feels more successful as a whole—and I love the conflicting and yet complementary feelings of earnestness, and also, a little, like I'm being punked. Percival Everett for everything.
Martyr! 8 ⏤ James 7
Mary Turfah
James was engrossing, its plot is propulsive. James, our narrator, as he toggles between existential questions and his literal survival, imagines what it might look like were the world different, wonders what it could take to get there, brings others with him as he forges a way.
Martyr! 8 ⏤ James 8
Kelly McEvers
A book that tells the story of Jim from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book I want to read. But even saying that sells short how truly excellent James is. On a single page, a character named Easter code-switches, talks about how he remembers the “splashing” on the slave ship, and gives Jim life advice as he teaches him how to forge a horseshoe. It’s funny, harrowing, propulsive, true to the original but totally untrue at the same time. It's the story I wish I had known all along. It should be read by all the fourth graders in all the land.
Martyr! 8 ⏤ James 9
This year’s champion:
James
Match Commentary
with the Tournament of Books Staff
Andrew Womack: And there we go, in a nail-biter of a final, congratulations to James and Percival Everett for taking home this year’s Rooster!
Rosecrans Baldwin: I want the Commentariat to know that we didn’t sequence the judges’ decisions above in any special order to foster tension—it’s exactly how we received them. Which meant Andrew and I had pretty suspenseful inboxes for a couple days.
Congratulations indeed to James and Percival Everett. We reached out to Percival regarding the win and offered him a live rooster, and he responded:
As I understand it, it was truly March Madness and it appears that I have won the blindfolded free-throw shooting contest. I am intrigued by the rooster offer, but I have lived with roosters and they are no good at conversation and equally bad at chess. So, I will decline the fowl offer and merely say, thank you for this honor. It really means a lot. Thanks for reading my work. Cheers.
Andrew: Why am I thinking that at some point our offer of free poultry may be something people actually do want as a means to discounted eggs. Anyway, in lieu of a bird, we will be making a donation to the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans in James’s honor.
Now over to our commentators!
John Warner: We’ve had other narrow final judgments, but when you look at the individual judging statements, this strikes me as the closest contest ever, and while I wasn’t surprised in this moment, having experienced the positive sentiment for Martyr! as the Tournament unfolded, it’s not something I would’ve predicted heading into the Tournament. I first read James while trapped on a plane sitting on the tarmac, and when my wife and I finally got home after a journey that was three times longer than expected and she remarked how horrible it was, I said, “Was it?” Which is to say the book held me in its grip from first to last.
Meave Gallagher: I feel entirely talked-out on both these books—no big feelings about either one. Mostly I want to empathize with Judge Turfah from the previous round. My full-time “job” (lol) for the past year-plus has been Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. As of this writing, I’ve been staying up until 2 or 3 all week, reading neighborhood Telegram channels and waiting for my friends to get internet access and check in. Maybe because of that I might’ve given the win to Martyr!, since that word is burned into my brain as “anyone who dies unjustly,” rather than someone who specifically dies for an ideology. Even put through the Google Translate mangler, Arabic has some beautiful expressions. And like Judge Sayed, I prefer the book with women with a little more agency (not to victim-blame again, of course James’s wife and daughter couldn’t have had the same agency). Though I’d have to care more to be mad at Roya for abandoning little Cyrus. What if he sucked as much as a baby as he did as an “adult?”
Well, this is a novel, this is the world. I wrote a whole digression about the Safavid Empire, and how they did some light forced relocation of Armenians, Circassians, and Georgians to serve the Shah, and how Armenians had been perfecting the art of making carpets since ?? BCE, and some Safavid shah or grand vizier proclaimed only Armenians would be allowed to use silk to make their carpets, because they were so talented? And so what you know today as Turkish or Persian carpets are actually versions of Armenian karpets [also an Armenian word]? Why did I want people to know that?
Anyway, James was good, I liked it just fine, but this does feel a bit like giving Agnès Varda the Academy Honorary Award in 2017. [Fist in air.] Justice for the mushroom-crazed Scooby gang and surrealist MILFs.
Alana Mohamed: Lol, Meave, that comparison does feel apt. On the point of confronting the Persian empire, I understand that the question of empire is especially present in this time of bloodthirsty American, UAE, and Israeli expansion, but I don’t think Martyr! would have been equipped to address it in any meaningful way. I do wonder what a more layered book about Cyrus would look like though. Colonial subjects often seek refuge in some national or cultural pride, but how many of us can say our cultures are untainted by the exploitation of others?
I’m actually quite surprised by how close this final round was. Of course, I had more tolerance for Cyrus than some of you good people and appreciated the (at times eye roll-inducing) risks Martyr! took on. (I also have a high tolerance for poets.) Judge Read’s comment on the code-switching conceit of James rang true for me, though I would say I was more than ambivalent. It troubled me so much that I can’t say I was ever really swept away by the novel.
That being said, I thought James was more ambitious and better executed. In terms of language and character, it felt more polished—which could feel alienating to some, perhaps why Judge Hughes says, “James lives in my head, but Martyr! lives in my heart.” To me, though, James is the obvious winner. I have little to say beyond saying that I am grateful to the judges for taking the time to share their thoughts and for this space to noodle around over good books. The clarity I gain from discoursing with Meave is most appreciated in these troubling times.
Kevin Guilfoile: It’s so fascinating that we ended up with, as John says, perhaps the closest final ever. For me, Martyr! is an impressive first novel, and James is a masterwork. As with Alana and John, it’s not particularly close in my own head. What holds the tiniest margin, however, is the intangible experience that each of these 17 judges brought to the reading of these books. What tipped them one way or the other is their own history—with previous books, with other people, with race, with culture, with war. It was a privilege all month to read about their interactions with these novels (and those of the Commentariat, as well). It’s why I still look forward to this event after two decades of doing it.
Rosecrans: As always, we want to express the greatest gratitude to Field Notes for continuing to sponsor the Rooster year after year. It’s pretty obvious: If you go support them by picking up some of their very good notebooks and other things, you’re supporting us.
Andrew: Thank you, also, to all of this year’s judges and commentators. Go follow them at your social media platform of choice! Subscribe to their newsletters! You can find out where to do all that over at this year’s judges page. Also, we are currently planning this year’s summer Rooster event, and it is going to be very different from what we’ve done in previous years. Make sure you’re signed up for the Rooster newsletter to find out more about that when it’s announced.
Now for some for more congratulations. First off, to James for also winning this year’s Henhouse—aka our people’s choice award—that the Commentariat voted on following Friday’s match. And congratulations as well to CR @popmediaprof and Cutty Flam, who won our guess-the-spread competition. Please email talk@themorningnews.org so we can coordinate your Field Notes subscriptions.
In closing, a massive thanks to our Sustaining Members, whose support makes this event happen year in and year out. I still recall when we launched our membership program a few years back. Up to that point, we’d been relying a good deal on advertising to fund what we do here, but that was going away, and as a result we very suddenly—in fact, around two days into that year’s Tournament—found ourselves without a sure way of putting on the event. And so we decided to ask you, our readers, for support, and you came through that year and every year since. So when I say our members make this event happen, this is not hyperbole.
Thank you all for reading, and we’ll see you again soon.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Audra, here is Benjamin Franklin Pierce, aka Hawkeye. Hawk was named for the M*A*S*H character, who was named for The Last of the Mohicans. Hawk was always a quiet guy, much more the sidekick to his pal Ezra, the white cat. He was more than happy to just hang out during reading time and liked to keep things light. He spent the last year reading along to audiobooks as his people toiled in the kitchen. He really expected All Fours to be about his people, but enjoyed it nonetheless.
Hawkeye crossed the Rainbow Bridge last week, with Ezra there to welcome him, leaving a big cat-sized hole in his home.