And the Finalists Are...

The PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction is given to the best work of fiction published in a given year. To learn more about this award click here.

This year's finalists are:


The winner will be announced on April 2, 2014. In the meantime, scroll down for an overview of each title.

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón. Feeling unfulfilled in the wake of personal and professional setbacks, South American youth Nelson lands a starring role in a revival of a legendary play by his hero and confronts the realities of civil war while touring unfamiliar landscapes. Alarcón's novel has landed on the "Best Books of 2013" lists by NPR, BookPage, Bookriot, on the San Francisco Chronicle Favorite Books of 2013: Francisco Goldman," and Flavorwire's "15 Favorite Novels of 2013."

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel by Percival Everett. Everett's novel is a story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? "This is a challenging book, but well worth the read; you won't think about popular fiction, the world of ideas, or old age in the same way again." (Library Journal Reviews)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. Coming of age in middle America, 18-year-old Rosemary evaluates how her entire youth was defined by the presence and forced removal of an endearing chimpanzee who was secretly regarded as a family member and who Rosemary loved as a sister. Fowler's novel was named a Best of 2013 pick by: The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, The Christian Science Monitor, Library Journal, and BookPage. It also received a starred review from Booklist Reviews: "Piquant humor, refulgent language, a canny plot rooted in real-life experiences, an irresistible narrator, threshing insights, and tender emotions—Fowler has outdone herself in this deeply inquisitive, cage-rattling novel." 

Fools by Joan Silber. When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber’s dazzling new story cycle tackle this question head-on. Fools received a starred review from Booklist Reviews who stated "Silber deftly handles a variety of time periods and places with enough recurring motifs . . .to link them all together and creates a memorable meditation on work, religion, love, and the search for personal integrity."

Search Party: Stories of Rescue by Valerie Trueblood. A collection of thirteen intertwined short stories that feature characters who are each searching for something. "The diamond-sharp stories in Trueblood's second collection dazzle. . . Despite the obstacles thrown in their way by fate (one character is knocked unconscious by her lover; another is stabbed by her mother; another fights cancer), Trueblood's characters do keep at it, searching not for meaning or answers, but simply for rest." (Publishers Weekly Reviews)