Annal:2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 PEN-faulkner winner
- Score: 10.54
A harvest and not a winnowing, The Early Stories preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. Of these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker, and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to the defunct Big Table and Transatlantic Review. All show Mr. Updike’s wit and verbal felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the transient world.
- 2004 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.54
A generous and intimate new novel—the first in six years—from American literature’s premier chronicler of middle-class angst in the new South.
In Elroy Nights, Frederick Barthelme does a fresh turn on territory he’s made his own over the last two decades: a middle-class America studded with characters maybe a little more wised-up than not—cautious, skeptical, private folks who would rather joke about their problems than complain about them.
Elroy Nights is a reasonably successful artist and professor, fifty-something, who is caught between the…
- 2004 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.54
With stories in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and in The Best American Short Stories, 2000, and as the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, ZZ Packer has already achieved what most writers only dream about-all prior to publication of her first book.
Now, in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident. Packer dazzles with her command of language-surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of…
- 2004 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.54
From Caryl Phillips—acclaimed author of The Nature of Blood and The Atlantic Sound—a masterful new novel set in contemporary England, about an African man and an English woman whose hidden lives, and worlds, are revealed in their fragile, fateful connection.
Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She’s recently bought her bungalow; he’s recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When…
- 2004 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.54
The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy’s Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.
Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.
The school’s mystique is rooted…
