PEN/Faulkner Award
Fiction
1981 How German Is It = Wie Deutsch Ist Es by Walter Abish
The novel tells the story of two brothers in the postwar "new Germany" whose father was executed for plotting against Hitler. Helmuth is an earnest municipal architect, and Ulrich is a writer involved with a terrorist group that destroys buildings like the ones Helmuth builds. Abish's novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award when it was published in 1980.
1982 The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
David Bradley's celebrated novel about a black man's search for his past was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best novels of 1981. It was also the winner of the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award.
1983 Seaview by Toby Olson
Allen hustles on golf courses to finance the journey from California to Cape Cod so that his wife can revisit her birthplace before she dies from cancer.
1984 Sent for You Yesterday/Brothers and Keepers by John Wideman
In this volume from Wideman's "Homewood" series, Doot Lawson attempts to reintegrate himself into the myths and stories of his parents' and grandparents' generations and overcome the intellectual distance that has grown between them since his departure from Homewood. This novel won the PEN/Faulkner award.
1986 The Old Forest and Other Stories by Peter Taylor
First published in 1985, these stories set in Taylor's native Tennessee won the PEN-Faulkner Award.
1987 Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley
Thirty years after World War II, Japanese-American jazz musician Teddy Maki is still haunted by his friend Jimmy Yamamoto's wartime death and his own failure to disobey a commanding officer's order to shoot an American prisoner.
1989 Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter
These 11 stories--some new, some old--cover a wide range of character, setting, and subject, moving from Barcelona to Colorado to West Point, and looking at life on the fringes through the eyes of two wealthy young lawyers, an Upper East Side mother and her au pair, men doing manual labor, and a group of film people in Italy. Salter's collection won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988.
1990 Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow
On Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx of the Great Depression, Billy spends his boyhood being groomed as an apprentice thug working for the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. When he falls in love with Drew, his boss's girl, he begins to think that the life of a mobster may not be the glamorous world he expected, and he resolves to take Drew away from it all.
1991 Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
Based on the 1985 bombing by police of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult Move, it tells of Cudjoe, a writer who returns to his neighborhood after a self-imposed exile, obsessed with finding the lone boy who ran from the flames.
1992 Mao II by Don DeLillo
A famous reclusive novelist becomes involved with international terrorism, finding through involvement in a dubious cause an escape from the doomed book he is working on. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
1993 Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx tells the story of Loyal Blood, who leaves the failing family farm in Vermont after World War II and goes west to see if he can do better. Each chapter in Loyal's odyssey is prefaced with one of the post cards he sends back home--where life is getting more and more bleak. Proulx's first novel, which is full of the daily minutiae of trying to keep a farm alive, won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.
1994 Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1994, Philip Roth's novel is about an American Jewish novelist named "Philip Roth," who is actually an imposter posing as the real Philip Roth. The imposter, Moishe Pipik, outrages Jews all over the world by advocating that Jews in Israel should go back where they came from. Roth threatens to sue, and Pipik diverts him with the ultimate weapon: a shiksa nurse from Chicago named Wanda Jane. The real Roth not only lusts after her, but finds himself becoming transformed into Pipik in much the way Pipik became him. Finally, the false Roth meets the real Roth in Israel, at the trial of an ex-Nazi--the culmination of a series of comic situations by means of which Roth--the real one--explores many of his favorite themes: doubleness, Jewish self-hatred, and the responsibility of the writer.
1996 Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault
A collection of 35 spare and concise stories, including 10 heretofore uncollected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1997.
1998 The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
A debut novel about Bear, a black Grizzly who plays alto saxophone well enough to make his mark in the world of Manhattan's jazz clubs. On the eve of cutting his first album, however, Bear is hauled off to jail for violating an obscure statute regulating animal acts in New York cabarets. How will he escape extradition back to the backwoods? Zabor manages suspense and satire equally well in this deft parody of music, ambition, and fame.
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's critically acclaimed novel, which is inspired by Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, tells three simultaneous stories. One is about Virginia Woolf while she is writing the novel in the mid-1920s. In another, a woman reading MRS. DALLOWAY in 1949 fights off despair. In the third, a woman named Clarissa (whose nickname is "Mrs. Dalloway") prepares a party for a friend in the late 1990s. The main action of each part of the novel takes place over the course of one day--as MRS. DALLOWAY does. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
2000 Waiting by Ha Jin
This multi-award-winning novel about a romance between Dr. Lin Kong, an unhappily married Chinese physician, and Manna Wu, the nurse he falls in love with, is a chronicle of Kong's attempt to get a divorce from his wife over the course of 17 years. The victim of an arranged marriage, Kong longs for an end--but each time they go to court, his very traditional wife, at the last minute, refuses. Kong is hoping to profit from a Chinese law that permits an automatic divorce after 18 years of separation--and his long, patient devotion and endless frustration can be seen as an allegory of life in a repressive society. In addition to being a passionate love story, WAITING is also an insightful and fascinating look at contemporary provincial China.
2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert family isn't doing well. Alfred has Parkinson's disease and a bad case of alienation from his wife, Enid. Gary is a banker with a heart of steel. Chip is in New York City trying to find himself, but losing the battle. And Denise is stuck in a destructive affair with someone very unsuitable. Enid is hoping to steal away with Alfred for a long-postponed cruise, but as things start to spiral out of control, the Lamberts must examine where they are, where they have been, and what exactly it means to be a family in the latter half of the 20th century. THE CORRECTIONS was a bestseller and a New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.
2003 The Caprices by Sabina Murray
These short stories by a Filipino-American writer all take place in World War II during the fighting in the Pacific.
2008 Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
After the 9/11 terrorist attack, Dutch equities analyst Hans van den Broek, his British wife, and his young son are forced to flee their devastated TriBeCa loft and find themselves living in the once-glamorous, now-dilapidated Chelsea Hotel. Hans's wife, horrified at the destruction and appalled at American politics, soon flees back to London with their son in tow. To fill the emotional hole in his life, Hans turns to cricket, that anachronistic and civilized sport, as an escape from his trauma and confusion, and finds himself becoming a friend, and sometimes accomplice, to an ambitious wheeler-dealer from Trinidad with dreams of building a cricket arena in Brooklyn. With a wry sense of humor and occasional unexpected stabs of poignancy, author Joseph O'Neill creates a wonderfully specific novel set against a backdrop of globalized crisis, and fractured, frightened families. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2008 and by Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2008.