Annal:1982 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 1982. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1982 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.32
The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man’s obsession with discovering what that something was—a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage. Returning home to care for and then bury his father’s closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, he comes upon the scant records of his family’s proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of…
- 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.
Housekeeping: A Novel
- 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 18.33
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again…
Ellis Island and Other Stories
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
Marshall Pearl is orphaned at birth aboard an illegal immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine in 1947 and brought as an infant to America. Determined to see the world in its beauty, ferocity, and ultimate justice, he does so, in scenes of gorgeous color and great excitement, as a child in the Hudson Valley, fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, at Harvard, in a slaughterhouse on the Great Plains, in the Mexican desert, on the sea, and in the Alps. Finally, he is drawn to Israel to confront the logic of his birth in a crucible of war, magic, suffering, and…
Take Me Back: A Novel
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.32
Richard Bausch’s novels and short stories render the struggles of ordinary people through simple, direct language and a straightforward narrative style. His southern Catholic sensibility and his emphasis on spiritual crises and the nebulous nature of human connections have evoked comparisons to the writing of Flannery O’Connor.
Take Me Back, Bausch’s second novel, set in a dingy apartment complex in fictional Point Royal, Virginia, explores the disaffected lives of Gordon Brinhart, an unsuccessful insurance salesman; his wife, Katherine, a former rock…
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme’s work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
