PW Daily newsletter announces The Caprices by Sabina Murray (Mariner) as the winner of the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
From the nomination site:
- Judges have selected five books published in 2002 as finalists for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction. The nominees are Peter Cameron for The City of Your Final Destination (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); William Kennedy for Roscoe (Viking); Victor LaValle for The Ecstatic (Crown Publishers, Random House); Sabina Murray for The Caprices (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Company); and Gilbert Sorrentino for Little Casino (Coffee House Press). The announcement was made Wednesday, March 12, 2003 by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Robert Stone, Chairman.
The judges-Gail Godwin, Valerie Martin, and Alexs Pate-considered approximately 357 novels and short story collections published in the U.S. during the 2002 calendar year from over 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.
The winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced in April; the four finalists will receive $5000 each. All five authors will be honored during the 23rd Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, S.E., on Saturday, May 17, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $100, and can be purchased by phoning the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077.
In Peter Cameron's The City of Your Final Destination, a naive young grad student travels to a crumbling mansion in Uruguay seeking authorization to write the biography of a suicidal novelist. With echoes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, the novel is about people in perpetual emotional transit, the random nature of love, and the ways in which we confront or avoid life's choices. The author of three other novels, including Andorra and The Weekend, and three story collections, Cameron teaches in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence and lives in New York City.
William Kennedy's Roscoe is the seventh novel in his Albany cycle, following the hero, a charismatic lawyer-politician and Democratic party machine head who tries to retire from the fray in 1945 at the end of World War II, but who is forced to stay and confront his past by a series of deaths, scandals and threats to his family. The novel takes the reader on an intricate, whirlwind tour of the author's native Albany in the first half of the twentieth century. Kennedy's Albany novels include Ironweed, a PEN/Faulkner finalist in 1984 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Legs, Quinn's Book and The Flaming Corsage. He has also published two books of nonfiction, O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car.
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