STILTSVILLE Wins PEN Prize
The PEN prizes were awarded last night and we’re pleased that Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville (Harper, 8/3/10) shares this year’s prize for a debut work of fiction. It didn’t get much national review attention (congrats to the Miami Herald, the author’s home town newspaper, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune for recognizing it), but it’s one of our favorites from last year (see our various stories about it) and one that came up on GalleyChat repeatedly. As we described it earlier,
No high drama or madness here, thank heaven; just an engrossing story of an “ordinary” woman as she meets the man she will marry, forms lasting friendships, and raises a family. It’s refreshing to read about good, caring people who struggle with many of the same issues we all do, but who bring an extra ounce of wisdom to it.
It was recently released in paperback:
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Large Type, Wheeler/Thorndike; ebook on OverDrive
The award is shared with a book that had more review attention, Danielle Evans’ book of short stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead). The NYT called it a “whip-smart … collection [that] charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice.”
Among the other winners were Stacy Schiff for Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown), Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner), which also won the Pulitzer Prize and the Award for Literary Sports Writing went to George Dohrmann for Play Their Hearts Out (Ballantine Books). The full list is here.