Annal:2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.5
This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.
For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he…
- 2000 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1999 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.5
A haunting story told with insight and powerful language, The Night Inspector chronicles an unforgettable character who navigates the desperate days and sleepless nights of a gilded yet polluted nineteenth-century New York.
William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, returns from the battlefields to New York City a hardened man, bent on reversing his fortunes. Much of the lower half of his face was torn apart when he was felled by enemy fire, and he is forced to wear a mask in his postwar life as a New York financial speculator. Despite the…
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies: A Novella and Stories
- 2000 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.5
In this new book of fiction, Ken Kalfus plucks individual lives from the stew of a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous.
The title story follows a nuclear power plant worker as he hawks a most unusual package on the black market - a canister of weapons-grade plutonium (Pu-239). “Budyonnovsk” skewers the relationship between Moscow and Chechnya. “Salt” is an economic fairy tale, featuring kings, princesses, and swiftly melting currencies. The novella “Peredelkino” traces the fortunes of an…
- 1999 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- 2000 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 22.49
With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the lovebetween a mother and her daughter. Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student in a small mill town, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between understandable fantasy and disturbing reality. When discovered, this emotional and physical trespass brings disgrace to Amy’s mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame she feels about her own past. In a fury, she lashes out at her daughter’s beauty and then retreats into…
Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (Sewanee Writers' Series)
- 2000 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.5
Claire, the young bride of a government contractor, arrives in Bangkok with her husband on March 9, 1967, the day U.S. planes begin bombing runs on North Vietnam. At a dinner party, she meets and befriends Jim Thompson, the real-life American entrepreneur and founder of the Thai Silk Company. Weeks later, on Easter Sunday, Thompson vanishes without a trace in the Thai highlands. As the political implications of Thompson’s disappearance surface, Claire becomes increasingly obsessed with his fate. Her quest into what happened, fueled by the longing and loneliness…
