Finalists have been named for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Three judges--Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas--selected five books from among more than 420 submitted works. The winner, who receives $15,000, will be announced April 2, with the four finalists receiving $5,000 each. All five authors will be honored May 10 during the 34th annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The 2014 shortlisted authors are:
Daniel Alarcón for At Night We Walk in Circles (Riverhead)
Percival Everett for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf)
Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Putnam)
Joan Silber for Fools (Norton)
Valerie Trueblood for Search Party: Stories of Rescue (Counterpoint Press).
---
Anthony Marra's debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth/Crown), and Justin St. Germain's memoir, Son of a Gun (Random House), are the winners of this year's Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards. Each writer was awarded $10,000 and a full year of marketing and merchandising support from the bookseller.
Second-place winners ($5,000 each) are NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (Little, Brown) for fiction and Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave (Knopf) for nonfiction. Third-place awards of $2,500 went to Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin) for fiction and With or Without You by Domenica Ruta (Spiegel & Grau) for nonfiction.
---
The New England Society in the City of New York has selected finalists for the 2014 New England Society Book Awards, honoring books that "celebrate New England and its culture" in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Art & Photography and Specialty Titles. The finalists are:
Fiction
The Curiosity by Stephen P. Kiernan
The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly
The One I Left Behind by Jennifer McMahon
The Rathbones by Janice Clarke
Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay
Nonfiction--Contemporary
A Child's Christmas in New England by Robert Sullivan, illustrated by Glenn Wolff
Lifesaving Lessons by Linda Greenlaw
Nonfiction--History & Biography
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick
Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice by Kevin Cullen and Shelly Murphy
Art & Photography
Greenwich Style: Inspired Family Homes by Cindy Rinfret
Houses of Maine: Elliott + Elliott Architecture by Matthew Elliott and Elizabeth Elliott
A Lifetime of Vermont People by Peter Miller
Winners will be announced later this month and an award ceremony will be held at the Grolier Club in New York on April 16. More information about the finalists and past winners available here.
