From the Director: Notable Fiction Honored by PEN
April 03, 2008
by Helene Atwan
I have the honor to serve as the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award administrator for PEN-NE (please visit the web site if you don’t know this wonderful organization, devoted to the causes of literacy and freedom of expression). Last Sunday was the day that the award was conferred, this year to novelist Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown), a remarkably witty and deeply affecting book about the world of work in an era of downsizing. The Hemingway is for a first work of fiction, and the judges also named two finalists, Rebecca Curtis for Twenty Grand (Harper Perennial) and Ravi Howard for Like Trees, Walking (Amistad). In the same ceremony, at the magisterial John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., PEN-NE handed out the L.L.Winship Award for fiction to Rishi Reddi for Karma and Other Stories (Harper Perennial), in Poetry to Ann Killough for Beloved Idea (Alice James Books), and in nonfiction to Kristin Laine for American Band (Gotham Books).
The ceremony began with Patrick Hemingway reading the opening of his
father’s American classic, A Farewell to Arms, a lacerating critique of
war. Joshua Ferris gave a passionate speech about the unique and vital
role of fiction in a world besotted by the promise of science and
technology, then treated us all to an absurdly funny passage from his
novel in which a character spoke only in lines from The Godfather
(you’ll just have to read the book). Ann Killough read two long and
powerful poems about our nation, caught up with its “vast apparatus of
conquest and its high-frequency cries of longing.” And finally,
novelist Alice Hoffman offered a riveting keynote address about women's
voices in contemporary American fiction, framed—in part—as a tribute to
two of the most compelling and original voices of our times, Grace
Paley and Tillie Olsen. Hoffman’s talk reminded all 600 or so readers
and writers gathered in the beautiful hall beneath photos of Papa H. of
just how hard it has been for women to break the stigma of
“domesticity” that has been used to diminish the work of writers from
Jane Austin to Paley and Olsen and their literary heirs. She had barely
finished when the room rose in unison to applaud her.
Hoffman’s words had special resonance on a stage where we had just
handed awards to four women for their first books (the PEN/L.L. Winship
Awards are given specifically for books about New England or by New
England writers, but not necessarily to first books). And for me, as
director of a press that has always tried to represent the interests
and voices of women, it was a most welcome reminder of how important it
is to our society that we pay attention to the voices not just of
women, but of people of color, of people from other cultures and
ethnicities; that we value beautifully crafted portrayals of the daily
struggles of family and work as much as, say, the bigger canvases of
war. Alice Hoffman’s words stayed with me through a wonderful dinner
with PEN friends, including Jennifer Haigh, a novelist who has the
unique distinction of having won both the PEN/Hemingway and PEN/L.L.
Winship and who “gave back” by serving as a judge of the Hemingway this
year. Her next novel, The Condition, promises to be her best yet, a
book deeply rooted in the “domestic.” And I thought of Hoffman’s talk
again as I settled in to look over the page proofs of one of our own
books, Patsy Harman’s The Blue Cotton Gown, a memoir entirely consumed
with the voices of women in rural West Virgina. A book which might well
have made Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley smile.
Helene Atwan began her career in publishing at Random House in 1976; she worked at A.A.Knopf, Viking Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Simon and Schuster, before being named director of Beacon Press in 1995. She served for eight years on the board of PEN-New England and is the Administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.