Annal:2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 PEN-faulkner winner
- Score: 10.53
From an acclaimed young author of Filipino background comes this history told through individual lives. The Caprices revolves around the Pacific Campaign of World War II. In the wreckage of bombed cities and overcrowded prison camps, there were no winners and no conquerors, and no nation truly triumphed.
Set in Southeast Asia, Australia, and the United States, these stories bring to life ordinary people who must rely on extraordinary measures of faith and imagination. In “Order of Precedence,” an Indian officer starving to death in a prison camp…
The City of Your Final Destination
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
A wryly humorous, impeccably observed novel about the capriciousness of love
Omar Razaghi posts a letter on September 13, 1995 that will change the course of his life forever. A doctoral student at the University of Kansas, he writes to the estate of the Latin American author Jules Gund, requesting permission to write Gund’s authorized biography. His request is refused, but Omar has already accepted a fellowship from the university, and with his girlfriend’s vehement encouragement, he goes in person to Uruguay to petition to Gund’s three executors. Although…
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
You’ve never met a politician like Roscoe (or have you?): a suave Falstaffian in a double-breasted white Palm Beach suit, unscrupulous, brilliant, exploding with courtly romance. It’s V-J Day, the war’s over, and Roscoe, after twenty-six years as chief braintruster of Albany’s notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there’s no exit, only new political wars, mysterious death, self-destructive party feuds, and scandalous threats to his beloved and her family.
Roscoe, the chivalrous warrior, turns his own life, and everybody else’s,…
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.53
Victor LaValle has already established himself as “one of the most eloquent voices of the approaching century” (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language that “crackles and hums” (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle’s debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family.
Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it’s getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony.…
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.53
In this novel of superbly stylized fragments of memory, Sorrentino captures the grit of golden-era Brooklyn. Each episode, affectingly textured with naked detail, is followed by the narrator’s deeper, more subjective climb down to the very bones of pure, poetic recollection. The reader, as though privy to a penetrating pyschological confession, accompanies the narrator, ferreting out the gristle and unconventional beauty found among the scrappy immigrant boys, hard-drinking blue-collar stiffs, and poor, sexy, and magenta-lipped women who inhabit the novel.
