Honor roll:PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

• 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 50.52

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.

Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…

The March: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow

• 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…

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

• 2001 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2001 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2001 Spectrum shortlist
• 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.51

It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that…

A Flag for Sunrise

Robert Stone

• 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.32

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

Gilead: A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

• 2005 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2004 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2005 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.55

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and…

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

• 2002 Orange winner
• 2002 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.52

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected…

Waiting

Ha Jin

• 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.5

This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he…

The Hours: A Novel

Michael Cunningham

• 1999 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1999 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.49

A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf’s last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose…

Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow

• 1990 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1989 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1990 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1989 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.4

In 1930’s New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz’s girlfriend. Relive…

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1983 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1983 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1982 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 30.33

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together—with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell….