The 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

"Delightfully head spinning. Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she's riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases... The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation." – The Washington Post

"James by Percival Everett feels like the book he was born to write... James combines satire, parody, adventure story, children’s fiction, horror. And he makes it look easy – it’s ferocious, but ferociously readable too." – The Guardian

"[A] mesmerizing and unsettling debut collection... Aguda is a precise and exciting prose stylist, and her stories offer vivid insights into tradition, family, and trauma... [A] smart, playful, and compassionate collection worthy of repeated reads." – New York Magazine

"If you want to know the challenges that Palestinian Americans face in the U.S., you must read this book. [Behind You Is the Sea] follows several families in Baltimore as they wrestle with poverty, religion, living in between two cultures and their pursuit of the American Dream... How their lives intersect will leave you at the edge of your seat." – NPR

"A dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and unexpectedly, piercingly moral... At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive... true, funny, sad, shrewd, and beautifully controlled through each unyielding sentence." – The New York Review of Books

"A family story, its central focus the bond between a mother and daughter, but like all of Louise Erdrich’s novels, the book broadens to tackle such vast subjects... It’s a thrilling book that reminds us — as if we needed further proof — that Erdrich is one of this country’s greatest writers." – PEOPLE

"In John Vercher's heart-wrenching novel, Devil Is Fine, the unnamed protagonist, a biracial writer, finds himself in constant conversation with the teenage son he unexpectedly lost... Caught between the natural world and the spirit one, he must come to terms with his family's brutal past and his son's death in order to find salvation." ―TIME

"Deeply resonant... The stories in The History of Sound are laden with dry humor, genuine sadness, and careful pacing. Just when you think you know where you’re going, Shattuck creates an unexpected, often scenic detour... Shattuck has a rare ability to write in a multitude of voices and styles, and an even rarer talent for bringing those voices into harmony." – The Boston Globe

"Ruben Reyes Jr. pulls off what can only be described as an exquisite–and heartbreaking–magic trick... you find yourself in the hands of a terrifically talented storyteller." – The Washington Post