David Bradleys novel The Chaneysville Incident won the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The novel was inspired by the discovery of the graves of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born. In 1981, the New York Times Book Reviewer Vance Bourjaily stated, “What [Bradley] can do, at a pretty high level of energy, is synchronize five different kinds of rhetoric, control a complicated plot, manage a good-sized cast of characters, convey a lot of information, handle an intricate time scheme, pull off a couple of final tricks that dramatize provocative ideas, and generally keep things going for 200,000 words. That’s about two and a half books for most of us.”

Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The novel is a story of Rosemary Cooke who grapples with the silence that consumes her after her siblings have vanished from her life. Fowler is most known for her novel The Jane Austen Book Club, which was later adapted into a movie of the same name. Much of Fowler’s work is centered around the lives of women and the theme of alienation. We are excited to see how Fowler could potentially incorporate those themes into an original piece, based on the theme ‘Magic,’ at the 30th Annual PEN/Faulkner Gala on September 24!

Come join us on Monday, September 24 to hear David Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler and eight other highly acclaimed authors read original pieces at the 30th Annual PEN/Faulkner Gala. Buy tickets at pfgala.org. It will be a night of literary magic!