Karen Joy Fowler Wins 2014 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize
Posted on April 4, 2014
Karen Joy Fowler has won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize for her thought-provoking novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Putnam). The novel is a story told by 22 year-old Rosemary Cooke. Rosemary has had a great deal of trouble socializing and fitting in over the years, and it's no wonder why. She was raised by an Indiana University psychology professor who did a very disturbing psychological experiment involving his family. Rosemary's brother disappeared and ended up in jail and her twin sister Fern disappeared around the age of five. So what happened to Fern and her brother? The journey, which is based on actual experiments conducted in the 1970s, is both comic and tragic. Judge Manuel Munoz said of the novel, "This superb novel is not only comic and smart, it packs a surprising emotional punch. Fowler captures an altogether new dimension of the meaning -- and heartbreak -- of family dynamics."
The four finalists will also receive $5,000 in prize money:
- Daniel Alarcon for At Night We Walk in Circles (Riverhead Books)
- Percival Everett for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf Press)
- Joan Silber for Fools (W.W. Norton & Company)
- Valerie Trueblood for Search Party: Stories of Rescue (Counterpoint Press)