Percival Everett’s ‘James’ among nominees on the long list for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize

By Canadian Press on February 3, 2025.

NEW YORK (AP) — Percival Everett’s “James” is up for another literary award — the PEN/Faulkner Prize for fiction. Other nominees include Louise Erdrich’s “The Mighty Red,” Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake” and Garth Greenwell’s “Small Rain.”

The awards long list of 10 was announced Monday by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, which will narrow the finalists to five in March and reveal the winner — who receives $15,000 — in April.

Everett’s novel, a dramatic reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” already has won the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was on the short list for the Booker Prize and is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award,

‘Pemi Aguda’s “Ghostroots,” Susan Muaddi Darraj’s “Behind You Is the Sea” and Ruben Reyes Jr.’s “There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven” also are PEN/Faulkner nominees, along with Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television,” Ben Shattuck’s “The History of Sound” and John Vercher’s “Devil Is Fine.”

Previous winners of the award, established in 1981, include Philip Roth, John Edgar Wideman and Yiyun Li.

The Associated Press