eBranch Blog

October 30, 2006

2006 PEN Literary Award Winners

The 2006 PEN Literary Award, honoring outstanding works published or produced in 2005 by writers who live west of the Mississippi River, were announced on October 12. The awards will be given at a dinner on December 12. Listed here are winners owned by HCPL. For a complete list of winners, see the PEN website. In addition to the category winners, Jane Smiley and Bob Shaye will receive career achievement awards.

Fiction
Percival Everett. Wounded
Training horses is dangerous - a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of intolerance." "As the first blizzard of the season gains momentum, John is forced to reckon not only with the daily burden of unruly horses, a three-legged coyote pup, an escape-artist mule, and too many people, but also with a father-son war over homosexuality, random hate crimes, and - perhaps most frightening of all - a chance for love.

Creative Nonfiction
Michael Chorost. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
Michael Chorost became a cyborg the day his new ear was booted up. Born hard of hearing, he went completely deaf in his thirties. Rather than live in silence, he chose to have a computer surgically embedded in his skull to restore his hearing. This is the story of Chorost's journey--from deafness to hearing, from human to cyborg--and how it transformed him. The melding of silicon and flesh has long been the stuff of science fiction, but as Chorost reveals in this memoir, fantasy is now giving way to reality. He found his new body mystifyingly mechanical: he could plug himself directly into a CD player; his hearing was routinely upgraded with new software. All this forced him to confront complex questions about humans in the machine age: When the senses become programmable, can we trust what they tell us about the world?
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Research Nonfiction
Adam Hochschild. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
From the author of the widely acclaimed King Leopold's Ghost comes the taut, gripping account of one of the most brilliantly organized social justice campaigns in history - the fight to free the slaves of the British Empire. In early 1787, twelve men - a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery - came together in a London printing shop and began the world's first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the campaign's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters to lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements. A deft chronicle of this groundbreaking antislavery crusade and its powerful enemies, Bury the Chains gives a little-celebrated human rights watershed its due at last.

Children's Literature
Virginia Canales. The Tequila Worm
Sofia grows up in the close-knit community of the barrio in McAllen, Texas, then finds that her experiences as a scholarship student at an Episcopal boarding school in Austin only strengthen her ties to family and her "comadres."