Annal:2006 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The March: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 38.56
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…
A Sudden Country: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.
James MacLaren, once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the Bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a…
I Got Somebody in Staunton: Stories
- 2006 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.56
In twelve graceful, sensual stories, William Henry Lewis traces the line between the real and the imaginary, acknowledging the painful ghosts of the past in everyday encounters. Written in a style that has been acclaimed by our finest writers, from Edward P. Jones and Nikki Giovanni to Dave Eggers, I Got Somebody in Staunton is one of the most highly praised literary events to take on contemporary America.
In the title story, a young professor befriends an enigmatic white woman in a bar along the back roads of Virginia, but has second thoughts about…
Last Night: Stories
- 2006 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.56
From a writer whose every book is a literary event, a superbly accomplished work of fiction. Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating.
In ten powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life–as it is and never will be again–when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend. A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner…
The Chrysanthemum Palace: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.56
The Chrysanthemum Palace introduces Bertie Krohn, the only child of Perry Krohn, creator of TV’s longest running space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators (which counts Jennifer Aniston and Donald Rumsfeld among its obsessed fans). Bertie recounts the story of the last months in the lives of his two companions: Thad Michelet, author, actor, and son of a literary titan; and Clea Freemantle, emotionally fragile daughter of a legendary movie star, long dead. Scions of entertainment greatness, they call themselves the Three Musketeers; between them, as Bertie…
