Annal:1981 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- –first–
- PEN/Faulkner Award
- 1982–>
How German Is It: Wie Deutsch Ist Es
- 1981 PEN-faulkner winner
- Score: 10.31
The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish’s novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American.
- 1981 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1980 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.31
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store. The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences—Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly’s matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens—their spirits are all here. Filled with unforgettable characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence, and dazzling in its originality, Toole’s comic classic just keeps getting better year after year.
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.31
Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy Recco, an eager ten-year-old in search of a father…Marie Recco, ne McGrath, an attractive divorce caught between her son and father, without a life of her own…John McGrath, dignified in manner yet brutally soured by life, insanely fearful of his daughter’s restlessness…Tom Thebus, a rakish salesman who precipitates the…
The Second Coming: A Novel
- 1980 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 28.3
Will Barrett, a lonely widower, suffers from a depression so strange and severe that he decides he doesn’t want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself, living alone in a greenhouse. What follows is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will goes in search of proof of God and winds up finding much more.
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 22.3
The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard’s most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women—seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal—becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard’s novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the…
- –first–
- PEN/Faulkner Award
- 1982–>
