2011 Pen/Faulkner Fiction Award Nominees
r at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, they have released the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominees. Here they are along with the 3G1B coverage of each book.
Brad Watson
Literature Unmanned: DH’s Best Reads of 2010
When I started the reading adventure on my own, picking my own books, I started collecting the Hardy Boys mysteries. There they are on the bookcase above the bureau in the bedroom that I shared with my brother … six … twelve … twenty-four … extending like the beige walls of a new Rome … an infallible barrier against the scary adult world that I didn’t understand.
Brad Watson's Guest Post
I just wrote a paragraph and it was sounding terrible and rambly and probably bullshit. Is it also, besides being sick of me, dinking around on four novels at the same time? Three of them in first person? I’m like some dandy deciding which gal I really like, or something, dithering. I’m doing the pages, and nothing’s really bad, but I can’t find the magnetic center yet. Like one of my favorite sayings, Lars Gustafsson telling his UT Austin students, “You must find the black hole to which everything is attracted.”
Noon by Brad Watson
When I typed out Brad’s sentence I nearly put a comma between “weeks” and “they”. That’s where I would have put one. But when I double-checked the text I saw no comma. And how much better you sense Beth and Tex, flitting through each other like shadows, without a comma! The sentence itself becomes shadowy. Should you care about such small details? Every sentence that you write is a shot at taking the reader by the throat.
Brad Watson's Carls Outside
The unknown is in the house and it’s your own child. This story is beautifully terraced as BW piles on closely observed detail after detail about what these suburban blocks look like, sound like, feel like…until this becomes your neighborhood, your block, your house. But in a parallel movement, the more palpably real the setting becomes the more frighteningly unknown Carl becomes.
Terrible Argument by Brad Watson
How can you take Brad Watson? How can you read stories that can make you so uncomfortable? A writer told me that depicting emotions is difficult. But there’s this great parallelism in the Aliens stories. It’s as if you had three mimes up on the stage. The most histrionic, tall and thin, represents your feelings. The second, more deliberate and circumscribed, represents your thoughts. The third mime, the most athletic, dressed in a track suit, represents your actions. They do improv. Now, that’s you.
Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich
When We Fell In Love – Helen Sedwick
When We Fell In Love – Helen Sedwick
The Delivery Cut Download
Our Frail Blood by Peter Nathaniel Malae