Judges for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have selected their nominees for the 2011 prize. Among those in contention are Jennifer Egan for A Visit From the Goon Squad and Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule.
Also nominated are Deborah Eisenberg for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Eric Puchner for Model Home, and Brad Watson for Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. The winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award will be announced on March 15th. All five nominees will be honored in a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, on Saturday, May 7th.
In their nomination announcement, the judges cited A Visit From the Goon Squad for its “masterful handling of multiple perspectives, tones, settings, and characters,” also calling it “an ample and deeply compassionate work.” They cited Lord of Misrule—which won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction—for its “Dazzling language” and noted that “Though we know trouble and misery will befall the novel’s character, tragedies are balanced by keen, hard-edged observation and linguistic verve.”
Click here to read an excerpt of Lord of Misrule (in paperback March 8th), and click here to read an excerpt from A Visit From the Goon Squad (in paperback March 22nd).