2013 Pen Faulkner Award Shortlist has been announced. "The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year."
Threats (M)
by
Amelia Gray
"David’s wife is dead. At least, he
thinks she’s dead. But he can’t figure out what killed her or why she
had to die, and his efforts to sort out what’s happened have been
interrupted by his discovery of a series of elaborate and escalating
threats hidden in strange places around his home—one buried in the sugar
bag, another carved into the side of his television. These disturbing
threats may be the best clues to his wife’s death: CURL UP ON MY
LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY.
I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL. Detective
Chico is also on the case, and is intent on asking David questions he
doesn’t know the answers to and introducing him to people who don’t
appear to have David’s or his wife’s best interests in mind. With no one
to trust, David is forced to rely on his own memories and faculties—but
they too are proving unreliable.In
THREATS, Amelia Gray
builds a world that is bizarre yet familiar, violent yet tender. It is
an electrifying story of love and loss that grabs you on the first page
and never loosens its grip."
publisher
Kind One (M)
by
Laird Hunt
"As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second
cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere."
In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty
promises of Linus' "paradise"—a place where the charms of her husband
fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny
befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm—until
Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her
husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus' death change
all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful,
Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America."
publisher
Hold it 'Til it Hurts (M)
by
T. Geronimo Johnson
"When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in
Afghanistan, their white mother presents them with the key to their
past: envelopes containing details about their respective birth parents.
After Troy disappears, Achilles—always his brother’s keeper—embarks on a
harrowing journey in search of Troy, an experience that will change him
forever. Heartbreaking, intimate, and at times disturbing, Hold
It ’Til It Hurts is a modern-day odyssey through war, adventure,
disaster, and love, and explores how people who do not define themselves
by race make sense of a world that does."
publisher
Watergate (M)
by
Thomas Mallon
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-zIQAInLuwOvA-Uwz2lvJfooFBNJHnhV5U_LH6loVOvMHRmzH8OruhHTHM86yTJKurlF3_rMmq-G2ZJDWkkP70rZDpbl5oO4RG5zNiZPy9C7x3He53PBmEVg7r4FfdBNniEhSfJjm5k/s200/watergate0001.jpg)
"For all the monumental documentation that Watergate
generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts,
and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of
inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s
greatest mysteries (who
did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In
Watergate, Thomas
Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency
through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we
knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to
the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of
Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s
sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter (“The clock is
dick-dick-dicking”), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself,
home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the
president’s attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the
shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars."
publisher
Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (M)
by
Benjamin Alire Saenz
"Benjamin Alire Sáenz's stories reveal how all borders—real, imagined,
sexual, human, the line between dark and light, addict and
straight—entangle those who live on either side. Take, for instance, the
Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande.
It's a touchstone for each of Sáenz's stories. His characters walk by,
they might go in for a drink or to score, or they might just stay there
for a while and let their story be told. Sáenz knows that the Kentucky
Club, like special watering holes in all cities, is the contrary to
borders. It welcomes Spanish and English, Mexicans and gringos, poor and
rich, gay and straight, drug addicts and drunks, laughter and sadness,
and even despair. It's a place of rich history and good drinks and cold
beer and a long polished mahogany bar. Some days it smells like piss.
"I'm going home to the other side." That's a strange statement, but you
hear it all the time at the Kentucky Club."
publisher
No comments:
Post a Comment