Annal:1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel
- 1995 PEN-faulkner winner
- Score: 10.45
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial for murder. Set in 1954 in the shadow of World War II, Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance.
- 1995 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 12.45
At forty-two, Jerome Corcoran—“Corky” to his friends and associates—is by all appearances a successful real estate developer and broker, a city councilman with a promising future in local politics, a genuine ladies’ man, and all-around great guy. His big house, fifteen-hundred-dollar suits, and the ridiculously large tips he hands out all over town reassure him that he’s put plenty of distance between himself and the family history (which includes a murdered father and raving mad mother) he’d rather forget. Corky may think that his inauspicious beginnings on…
- 1995 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.45
Like Hansel and Gretel, the characters in The Children in the Woods are concerned with survival; in the subtle playing out of this dark fairy tale, Busch makes palpable the themes of love, loss, alienation, and disillusionment. In “Critics,” it is the hierarchy of familial relationships that isolates an only child; in “The Settlement of Mars,” a young boy’s first recognition of the adult world is a frightening and disorienting experience; in “My Father, Cont.,” a child fantasizes he will be abandoned by his bickering parents; and in “Folk Tales,” a man’s…
- 1995 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.45
Stones from the River is a daring, dramatic and complex novel of life in Germany. It is set in Burgdorf, a small fictional German town, between 1915 and 1951. The protagonist is Trudi Montag, a Zwerg—the German word for dwarf woman. As a dwarf she is set apart, the outsider whose physical “otherness” has a corollary in her refusal to be a part of Burgdorf’s silent complicity during and after World War II. Trudi establishes her status and power, not through beauty, marriage, or motherhood, but rather as the town’s librarian and relentless collector of…
Various Antidotes: Stories
- 1995 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.45
In her first collection of short stories, Various Antidotes, Scott culls from the annals of science and medicine real and imaginary figures whose peculiar obsessions she transmutes with effortless alchemy into the stuff of art. In one story she writes of van Leeuwenhoek, the mad lens-grinder of Delft, whose early microscope designs allowed him to see life in a drop of water and for whom “there was hardly a difference between discovering life and creating it.” In another she offers an account of the origin of the verb burke, after William Burke, who was…
