Award
PEN/Faulkner Award
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction honors the year’s most distinguished works of fiction by American authors. Judged by writers, the award names one winner and four finalists, with the winner receiving a $15,000 prize.
2026
Small Scale Sinners
In twelve electric, potent stories, Mahreen Sohail explores the facets of women’s lives, as daughters, siblings, and mothers, in marriage, and alone. She writes of women who are fluent in the language of grief, but refuse to be confined by it; of lives that are full of desire and betrayal; of a...
2025
Small Rain
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years...
2024
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in *Catfight*, a raunchy...
2023
The Book of Goose
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago.
Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built...
2022
The Wrong End of the Telescope
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a...
2021
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world,...
2020
Sea Monsters
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence.
Tomás may also help Luisa...
2019
Call Me Zebra
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. Alone and in exile, she leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are her only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic, and...
2018
Improvement
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three–month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter.
Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that...
2017
Behold the Dreamers
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at...
2016
Delicious Foods
Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.
Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself...
2015
Preparation for the Next Life
Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert.
A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's...
2014
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion......
2013
Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club
Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes it's an escape, and sometimes it's just the bridge you cross to go home. All borders entangle those who live on either side, resulting in many a tale. Take, for instance, these seven evocative stories coming out of the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two...
2012
The Buddha in the Attic
Told in a collective voice, The Buddha in the Attic follows a group of Japanese women who travel to the United States in the early 20th century as “picture brides,” leaving behind their homes to marry men they have only seen in photographs. Upon arrival, they confront a reality far different from...
2011
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg brings together a wide-ranging selection of short fiction that examines the inner lives of characters navigating relationships, work, and shifting social landscapes. Set in cities, artistic communities, and international settings, the stories follow...
2010
War Dances
War Dances is a collection of stories and poems that explore the complexities of identity, family, and cultural belonging. Many of the pieces follow Native American characters navigating life between reservation and city, tradition and modernity, often confronting the lingering effects of history...
2009
Netherland
In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, and left alone after his English wife and son return to London, Hans van den Broek stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and...
2008
The Great Man
Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however, is that Oscar is also survived by his longtime...
2007
Everyman
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely...
2006
The March
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for...
2005
War Trash
Set in 1951-53, *War Trash* takes the form of the memoir of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, one of a corps of "volunteers" sent by Mao to help shore up the Communist side in Korea. When Yu is captured, his command of English thrusts him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the...
2004
The Early Stories
The Early Stories: 1953–1975 gathers a wide selection of John Updike’s short fiction from the first decades of his career, offering a detailed portrait of American life in the mid-20th century. Set in suburban neighborhoods, small towns, and cities, the stories focus on ordinary individuals...
2003
The Caprices
The Caprices is a collection of stories set across Europe during World War II and its aftermath, tracing the lives of individuals caught in moments of upheaval, displacement, and survival. Moving through different countries and perspectives, the stories depict soldiers, civilians, refugees, and...
2002
Bel Canto
At a lavish birthday party in a South American country, diplomats, business leaders, and dignitaries gather to hear a celebrated opera singer perform. The evening is abruptly interrupted when a group of insurgents storms the residence, taking the guests hostage in an effort to secure political...
2001
The Human Stain
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about...
2000
Waiting
The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in acclaimed author Ha Jin’s *Waiting*, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance.
Every summer, Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the...
1999
The Hours
The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a beloved friend of an ailing poet, who one fine New York morning goes about planning a party in his honor; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf,...
1998
The Bear Comes Home
The novel follows a highly unusual protagonist: a bear who lives among humans and plays the saxophone with extraordinary skill. Moving through the world of jazz clubs, recording studios, and late-night performances, the Bear becomes both a celebrated musician and an outsider, navigating a life...
1997
Women In Their Beds
Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. In this reissue of her collected stories—twenty years after its first publication—with a new introduction by renowned author...
1996
Independence Day
Frank Bascombe, Book 2
Over the course of a long Fourth of July weekend, Frank Bascombe—a former sportswriter turned real estate agent—navigates the complexities of his midlife existence. Living in suburban New Jersey after a divorce, Frank tries to maintain a sense of calm detachment from the disappointments and...
1995
Snow Falling on Cedars
San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.
In the course of the ensuing trial, it...
1994
Operation Shylock
In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own...
1993
Postcards
After committing a violent act that he cannot undo, Loyal Blood leaves his family’s farm in rural Vermont and begins a life of restless wandering across the American landscape. Moving from place to place, he takes on temporary work and drifts through decades of change, sending occasional postcards...
1992
Mao II
Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his...
1991
Philadelphia Fire
From “one of America’s premier writers of fiction” (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other...
1990
Billy Bathgate
In Depression-era New York, a street-smart teenager known as Billy Bathgate is drawn into the orbit of Dutch Schultz, a powerful and volatile crime boss. What begins as a chance encounter soon turns into a dangerous apprenticeship, as Billy is taken in by the gang and exposed to a world of wealth,...
1989
Dusk and Other Stories
Two New York attorneys newly flush with wealth embark on a dissolute tour of Italy; an ambitious young screenwriter unexpectedly discovers the true meaning of art and glory; a rider, far off in the fields, is involved in an horrific accident—night is falling, and she must face her destiny alone.
1988
World's End
Haunted by the burden of his family’s traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.
It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the...
1987
Soldiers in Hiding
It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene.
Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the...
1986
The Old Forest and Other Stories
The Old Forest and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction set primarily in the American South, where tradition, family, and social expectations shape the lives of its characters. Moving between different moments and perspectives, the stories explore relationships within families and...
1985
The Barracks Thief
The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from...
1984
Sent for You Yesterday
Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Sent for You Yesterday weaves together the lives of a close-knit community through memory, storytelling, and shifting perspectives. At its center is Doot, a writer who returns to his childhood neighborhood, revisiting the people and events that shaped his...
1983
Seaview
Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route.
Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a...
1982
The Chaneysville Incident
Legend has it something happened in Chaneysville . . .
John Washington is coming home to Chaneysville. Old Jack Crawley, his father's closest friend and John’s guardian, is dying, and the young man will care for him in his final days.
For the brilliant and embittered black historian, it is a...
1981
How German Is It
The question "How German Is It" underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish's novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate...