Annal:1996 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1996 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.46
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 children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and…
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.46
Haiti in the late eighteenth century: a French colonial society founded on the backs of its black slaves; a morass of shifting political and personal loyalties, of hatred and cruelty meted out to match the increments of lightness and darkness in the color of skin; a world already haunted by its recent genocidal history and facing a new war of extermination in its dangerously near future. This is the setting for Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising—an explosive, epic historical novel.
Leaving the dark, contemporary world he has made his own in nine…
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.46
Thirty years in the making, William Gass’s second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle-aged professor who, upon completion of a massive historical study, “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany”, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all else, language.
“The haunting evocations of a small-town childhood [are] so sensually rich…
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.46
In the words of Melody Simpson, their mother, Emmy was born with thick skin and Virginia with no skin at all. It is on Bali and Skye, two islands as far apart as geography allows, that the sisters independently reassess their place in the world and gingerly find the new bearings that will allow each to renegotiate the circumstances of their lives with newfound acceptance and flexibility.
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.47
It is 1963, and young Denise Palms, reared in rural Virginia by her grandmother, has just rejoined her mother, new stepfather, and two older brothers in Detroit. Denise is an ordinary, intelligent negro girl in a not unusual negro family, which means that she is expected to cook and clean house, go to school, and take care of her mother’s baby when it comes. In this groundbreaking debut, A. J. Verdelle tells the story of Denise’s family—a story filtered through the perspective of Denise’s vibrant, maturing intelligence. Studies with an uncompromising new teacher,…
