Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Roth wins PEN/Faulkner literary award

Roth wins PEN/Faulkner literary award - Yahoo! News

I suppose it's not a real surprise for Roth to win this for Everyman, though I don't think it was all that. What's more important here is the list of runners-up:

Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum"
Deborah Eisenberg's "Twilight of the Superheroes"
Amy Hempel's "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel"
Edward P. Jones' "All Aunt Hagar's Children."

D'Ambrosio's book was one of my favorites, and it's good to see some acknowledgement of its quality, but what might be more important is that his book along with all the other runners-up are books of SHORT STORIES. Are short stories back? Eisenberg's and Hempel's books showed up on best of 2006 lists. Do we like short stories again? Or more importantly, will publishers be willing to take on more short story collections?

I'll have to write more on this later.

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