Julie Otsuka Wins PEN/Faulkner Award

A National Book Award finalist, Julie Otsuka's second novel The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle] has won this year's PEN/Faulkner Award. The brief, poetic novel about Japanese war brides is told in the first person plural. The finalists were:

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin [Kindle]

Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Stories [Kindle]

Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance [Kindle]

Steven Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories [Kindle]

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle]

 

In other PEN news, the lineup for this year's World Voices festival features more gay writers than in previous years. At minimum: Nikki Finney, Tony Kushner, Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Justin Torres, and David Levithan. The non-gay participants are pretty impressive, too: Laurie Anderson, Atwood, Auster, Amis, Eisenberg, Egan, Danielle Evans whom you really need to read and not only because her collection is called Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Hemon, Herta Muller, Claire Messud, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose, George Packer, Victoria Redel, Rushdie, Sante, Marjane Satrapi, Shteyngart, Simic, and Anne Waldman, among dozens of other authors. Considerately, this fest runs April 30 - May 6, which means the day after the Tribeca Film Festival ends (April 18 - 29) you can turn your full attention to what really matters.