PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The 2010 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction has been awarded to Sherman Alexie for his collection of stories and poems in War Dances.

Here is an excerpt from the press release:
The honored book, War Dances, is a collection of structurally inventive pieces on the themes of love, betrayal, familial relationships, race, and class. The stories are interspersed with poems which refract their themes or topics. About this collection judge Al Young says, “War Dances taps every vein and nerve, every tissue, every issue that quickens the current blood-pulse: parenthood, divorce, broken links, sex, gender and racial conflict, substance abuse, medical neglect, 9/11, Official Narrative vs. What Really Happened, settler religion vs. native spirituality; marketing, shopping, and war, war, war. All the heartbreaking ways we don’t live now—this is the caring, eye-opening beauty of this rollicking, bittersweet gem of a book.”

The other finalists for this year’s award were:

The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver

Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories
by Lorraine M. Lopez
(to be ordered)

A Gate at the Stairs: a novel
by Lorrie Moore

Sag Harbor
by Colson Whitehead