The Center for Fiction has unveiled the annual shortlist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, a prize that carries $10,000 for a debut novel. Seven first-time novelists made the list. Judges this year include last year’s winner Margaret Wrinkle, as well as David Gilbert, Tayari Jones and Sigrid Nunez.
All of the short-listed authors will give a reading at the Center for Fiction on December 8th. The winner will be announced the next night at The Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York. Wrinkle will present the award. All of the runners up will receive a $1,000 prize.
Explore the shortlist after the jump. (more…)
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With piercing wit, And Sons is a hilarious and heartfelt look at the generations of two prominent East Coast families. Skewering everything from the publishing world to Hollywood to father/son relationships, Gilbert is spot-on with his satire and crafts a great story. Books mentioned in this post And Sons David Gilbert New Trade Paper $16.00
I am a sucker for a great American novel, in particular ones set in college and this kind of fits into both those categories but with a twist. This was originally described to me as Wonderboys meets The Art of Fielding which isn’t necessarily true. Instead imagine a novel like Wonderboys or The Art of Fielding and then imagine what happens to the author and his family forty years later.
A.N. Dyer is the author of Ampersand, a seminal work of American literature set in a college in the 1950s. It was the defining book of his career and is still held in reverence forty years later. A.N. Dyer, Andrew, is now an old man. He has three sons, two with his wife and one from an affair that ended his marriage. Following the death of his oldest and closest friend Andrew, sensing his own imminent mortality, tries to repair his damaged relationship with his sons.
Gilbert treads a fine line throughout the book between satire and metafiction dipping in and out of each almost perfectly. He deftly blurs the lines between fact and fiction in his fictitious world. The way his dissects the publishing industry is wickedly brilliant but the core of the novel is the relationship between fathers and sons and the battles fought over legacy and individualism. The story is narrated by Philipp Topping, the son of Andrew’s recently deceased best friend, who I wouldn’t go as far to say is an unreliable narrator but he definitely has his own biases. The story does take a slightly odd turn but Gilbert keeps everything on the road.
A clever story of fathers and sons and a tragic exploration of the great American novel and it’s aftermath.
Buy the book here…