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2010 Pen/Faulkner Award Winner

Fresh off his National Book Award win, Alexie delivers a heartbreaking and hilarious collection of stories that explores the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large. …More

2009 Pen/Faulkner Award Winner

The author of the "New York Times" Notable Book "Blood-Dark Track" delivers a mesmerizing novel about a man trying to make his way in an America of shattered hopes and values, and the unlikely occurrences that pull him back into an authentic, passionately engaged life. …More

2008 Pen/Faulkner Award Winner

Christensen pens a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-garde--of theuntidy truths, needy egos, and jostling for position behind the glossy facadeof artistic greatness--in this story of a New York City painter living in theheroic generation of the 1940s and 1950s. …More

Winner - 2007 Pen/Faulkner Award
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The bestselling author of "The Plot Against America" now turns his attention to one man's lifelong confrontation with mortality. From his first glimpse of death during his childhood through his vigorous, seemingly invincible prime, Roth's hero is a man bewildered not only by his own decline but by the unimaginable deaths of his contemporaries and those he has loved. …More

Winner - 2006 Pen/Faulkner Award
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In the last years of the Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. …More

Winner - 2005 Pen/Faulkner Award
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From the National Book Award-winning author of "Waiting, here is his most ambitious work to date; a powerful, unflinching novel that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war--the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict--and paints an intimate story against a sweeping canvas of confrontation. Set in 1951 and based on historical accounts, "War Trash takes the form of the memoir of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, a "volunteer" fighting unofficially in Korea when he is captured. Yu's fluency in English thrusts him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare--between the prisoners and their captors and between rival groups of prisoners--that defines the world of the POW camp. Yu's only allegiance is to his dream of returning home. But by the end of this unforgettable novel, the very concept of home will be more profoundly altered than Yu can even begin to imagine. …More

Winner - 2004 Pen/Faulkner Award
This grand collection of 103 stories gathers together almost all the short fiction that Updike published between 1953 and 1975, beginning with "Ace in the Hole" and ending with "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer." …More

Winner - 2003 Pen/Faulkner Award
From an acclaimed young author of Filipino background comes a history of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, told through individual lives. Her accomplished stories depict a savage war and the lives that it altered. …More

Winner - 2002 Pen/Faulkner Award
From the bestselling author of "The Magician's Assistant" comes a marvelous novel of love, opera, and terrorism set in South America. Two couples, complete opposites, fall in love; sexual identities become confused; and a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth. …More

Winner - 2001 Pen/Faulkner Award
Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciations and rituals of purification, the newest novel by award-winning author Philip Roth concludes his eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives begun in "American Pastoral" and continued in "I Married a Communist."

Booklist (Wednesday, Martch 01, 2000)

/*Starred Review*/ With the help of his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth continues the inquiry into the state of the American soul during the second half of the twentieth-century. Fueled by the story of his magnetic hero, Coleman Silk, it roars, with heart-revving velocity, through a literary landscape that embraces the politics of race and sex, the Vietnam War, and the absurdity of extreme political correctness, the dumbing down of the academy, and President Clinton's impeachment. Coleman, a classics professor at a small Berkshire college, embodies all the ambition, paradox, anger, and futility of the American dream, and, over the course of his secretive life, he displays all the mettlesome powers of the Greek and Roman gods he helps immortalize. Naturally, a man this fired up makes enemies, and no one defends him when his brilliant career capsizes over a misunderstanding regarding his use of the word "spooks" to refer to students who failed to materialize in the classroom. How was he to know they were black? How was anyone to know that he would be the last professor on earth to make a racist remark? Enraged by the inanity of the ensuing brouhaha, Coleman resigns. Then, when his wife dies unexpectedly, he becomes involved with a woman who is half his age and illiterate. These unlikely lovers are surely doomed, and Zuckerman seems destined to discover the truth about Coleman, which reveals so many truths about the land he so passionately portrays. As Roth unfurls his hero's galvanizing tale, he protests the tyranny of prejudice and propriety, recognizes the "terrifyingly provisional nature of everything," and shakes his head in sorrow and wonder over the "inevitably stained creatures that we are." ((Reviewed March 1, 2000)) (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)

Winner - 2000 Pen/Faulkner Award
With wisdom, restraint, and empathy for all his characters, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. "A simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. . . . Jin's account of daily life in China is convincing and rich in detail".--"Chicago Tribune". …More

Winner - 2000 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
Winner - 1999 Pen/Faulkner Award
Winner - 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The author of "At Home at the End of the World" and "Flesh and Blood" 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. …More

Winner - 1998 Pen/Faulkner Award
In this "hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity" ("Publishers Weekly"), "Zabor's knack for detail makes the absurd premise (a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear) believable" ("The New Yorker"). …More

Winner - 1997 Pen/Faulkner Award
This remarkable collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. …More

Winner - 1996 Pen/Faulkner Award
Winner-1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He's still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved, along with their two children, to Connecticut. (He bought her old house and made it his home.) In the midst of his so-called Existence Period, Frank is happy enough in his peculiar way, more or less sheltered from fresh pain and searing regret. And he has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend (while the nation lurches toward another election, Bush vs. Dukakis, in uncertain prosperity). As a realtor he's seeking a house and a life's accommodation for deeply hapless clients relocating from Vermont; in his free time he takes pride in managing his entrepreneurial, and civic, sidelines. Then he will travel to the Jersey Shore, where his girlfriend and delight awaits him. Finally, up the Northeast Corridor, to Connecticut, there to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son, and together they will visit as many sports halls of fame as they can in two days. But Frank's Independence Day turns out not as he'd planned. This decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. And in this embattled ascent Richard Ford captures the mystery of life - in all its conflicted glory - with grand humor, intense compassion and transfixing power. …More