NEW YORK – Alice McDermott’s novel about military wives in Vietnam, “Absolution,” and the Jamel Brinkley story collection “Witness” are among the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
The other nominees announced Tuesday include Henry Hoke’s “Open Throat,” the rare novel to be narrated by a mountain lion; Claire Jiménez’s family drama-mystery, “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” and Colin Winnette’s tech-saga, “Users.”
“With an astonishingly varied range of protagonists — the ghosts of New York City, U.S. military wives in wartime Saigon, Staten Island Latinas, a virtual reality designer, and a mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign — this year’s finalists offer definitive proof that fiction, to invoke Walt Whitman, contains multitudes,” PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair Louis Bayard said in a statement.
The winner, to be announced next month, receives $15,000. The runners-up each get $5,000. Previous winners include Philip Roth, Ann Patchett and Yiyun Li.
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