Millhauser's 'We Others' a Finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award

Steven Millhauser's We Others: New and Selected Stories has been selected for the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction.

The collection pulls together30 of Millhauser's short stories from the last 30 years, with settings that range from a museum of oddities ("The Barnum Museum") to Thomas Edison's laboratory ("The Wizard of West Orange").

Also a finalist is Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin. Banks is a long-time participant in the New York State Summer Writers Institute, hosted at Skidmore.

The other three finalists:

• Don DeLillofor The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
• Anita Desaifor The Artist of Disappearance
• Julie Otsukafor The Buddha in the Attic

The judges-Marita Golden, Maureen Howard, and Steve Yarbrough - considered nearly 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2011 calendar year.

The winner will receive $15,000 and the four finalists will each receive $5,000. 

Often compared to Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, Millhauser holdsthe Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Martin Dressler. 

"I chose stories that seized my attention as if they'd been written by someone whose work I had never seen before," he writes in introducing We Others. "What makes a story bad, or good, or better than good, can be explained and understood up to a point, but only up to a point. What's seductive is mysterious and can never be known. I prefer to leave it at that." 

In his review of We Others in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Lethem calls Millhauser "the master of what might be called the Homeopathic School of Fantastic Writing: just the barest tincture of strangeness, eyedropped into the body of an otherwise mimetic story."

"The payoff for this withholding of weirdness," Lethem continues, "can be a reader's intensified complicity in defamiliarization: a sensation of slippage into the unreal just as we know it ourselves, from our dreams and fantasies."

Also in recognition of We Others, Millhauser is a finalist for the Story Prize, the richest prize of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. Established in 2004 to honor short story collections, the $20,000 prize is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation. Other Story Prize finalists this year are Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda and Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision.

The winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award will be announced March 26. A ll five authors will be honored Saturday, May 5 during the 32nd Annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.  

The winner of the Story Prize will be announced in New York on Wednesday, March 21 after each finalist reads from his work and is interviewed on-stage.