Award Update: PEN/Faulkner, Bollingen, Bronte

We're late in catching up with the PEN/Faulkner award announcement from Monday. It always sneaks up out of nowhere, in part because they don't announce the nominees ahead of time, thereby disappointing office-pool fans across America, and in part, at least this year, because the announcement came the day after the Oscars. This year, for the third time, the award went to Philip Roth, for Everyman, which got solid reviews but until now had been ignored by award juries. He told the Washington Post he was pleased because "there just seems to be a consistency to the quality of the winners" of the PEN/Faulkner. One consistency is their love of Philip Roth: this is his third win in the last 14 years

The other nominees were all short story collections:

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

More award news: Yale University's Bollingen Prize, given every two years, usually for lifetime achievement, and perhaps the most prestigious American poetry award, was given to Frank Bidart, who teaches at Wellesley and whose latest collection is Star Dust. (He's also the editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems.) The Bollingen Prize winners, as listed on their pretty but confusing and not up-to-date site, are a roll call of American 20th-century poetry: Frost, Moore,Pound, Cummings, Auden, Stevens, Rich, Ashbery... Jeez, Mr. Bidart: that's a helluva club you've just joined.

And starting a brand new club, the finalists for the inaugural Brontë Prize were announced on Friday. Named after Charlotte B., the prize models itself after the Hugos and the Edgars in honoring one of the most popular literary genres, defined as "romantic fiction." The winner, "One title chosen the best from more than 400 love stories published in North America in the last year," will be named on March 15 from these nominees (and given a $12,500 prize):

Angels Fall by Nora Roberts
Bee, Balms & Burgundy by Nelson Pahl (not available on Amazon?!? Here's his site.)
Finding Noel by Richard Paul Evans
Tear Down the Mountain by Roger Alan Skipper
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore