Karen Joy Fowler wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Somehow missed the shortlist announcement, but it is very cool to see that Karen Joy Fowler won this year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel, We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, which was one of my favorite 2013 books.  I've read one of the other shortlisted titles and likely will read the others at some point in the future.

The other finalists:

Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil RussellJoan Silber, Fools 
Valerie Trueblood, Search Party: Stories of Rescue

2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction nominees

Since I'm seemingly bent on reading and possibly reviewing every one of the major spring literary award shortlists in fiction (and a few other fields), here's the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award shortlist that was announced a week ago, with the winner to be announced March 26:

• Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin
• Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories 
• Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance
• Steven Millhauser for We Others:  New and Selected Stories 
• Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic

I've already read three of the finalists here and I should finish the others in the next week or so.  If I get the chance to review them before the winner is announced, I'll either post them on Gogol's Overcoat or here, maybe as a delayed mirror of the post there.

Very solid list from what I've read so far, especially Otsuka's book, which I reviewed very positively when it was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Fiction.