2011 PEN/Faulkner Award finalists announced
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The five finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction were announced Wednesday, and included National Book Award winner ‘Lords of Misrule’ by Jaimy Gordon.
Southern California writer Eric Puchner’s ‘Model Home’ is the only other traditionally structured novel in the running for the award. The novel-in-stories ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan is also a finalist, along with the short-story collections ‘Aliens in the Prime of their Lives’ by Brad Watson and Deborah Eisenberg’s ‘The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.’
The PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction was founded in 1980 by Mary Lee Settle, a National Book Award-winning writer who felt the literary establishment was unreceptive to Southern writers and that it valued ‘personality over achievement.’
The winner will receive $15,000; each runner-up gets $5,000. The winner is be announced and all finalists honored at an event at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington on May 7. Tickets, which are $100, include dinner.
Previous PEN/Faulkner Award winners include Philip Roth’s ‘The Human Stain,’ Ha Jin’s ‘Waiting,’ Ann Patchett’s ‘Bel Canto’ and Sherman Alexie’s ‘War Dances.’
Read the Los Angeles Times reviews of the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award finalists.
‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan ‘The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg’ by Deborah Eisenberg ‘Lords of Misrule’ by Jaimy Gordon ‘Model Home’ by Eric Puchner
‘Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives’ by Brad Watson was not reviewed by the L.A. Times. It was published by W.W. Norton in March 2010.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
