Fiction Finalists 
Mark
Costello
Big If
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Mark
Costello was born and raised near Boston, and is
a former federal prosecutor. In 1990 he co-authored Signifying
Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present with David
Foster Wallace. He published his first novel, Bag Men
(1996), under the name John Flood. He teaches criminal
law at Fordham University and lives in New York City with
his family. |
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In a riff on recent
history and the American obsession with assassination,
five Americans - bodyguards and soccer dads and campaign
volunteers - long for security in the crowds and in
their own lives. At the center is the story of Vi,
a secret service bodyguard protecting the Vice President
campaigning for the White House, and her troubled
brother, a software genius poised to make a fortune
on "BigIf," a state-of-the-art computer
game.
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| The
Book That Changed My Life |
The
Jerusalem Bible
No, not THE Bible, and surely not the rapturous
King James, the book that changed (or rather, made) my
life is this particular mid-60s translation, standard
for all baby-booming Catholics in America until 1985.
The language is generic, functional, American: a God for
suburban middle-managers---and that's the voice I still
have in my head today. |
Adam Haslett
You Are Not a Stranger Here
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A graduate of Swarthmore
College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Adam
Haslett has published his work in Zoetrope:
All Story, The Yale Review, BOMB magazine,
and on National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts."
He has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine
Arts Work Center and the Michener/Copernicus Society of
America. He is currently a student at Yale Law School. |
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A
debut collection of nine stories about anguished and complex
people: mourning mothers; maniacal fathers; schizophrenics;
depressed, lonely teenagers; perplexed gay men; treacherous
and jealous brothers; and other victims of human grief.
The book is a landscape of absences, deaths, and peculiar
salvations, taking place in settings ranging from the
American West to New England to Great Britain. |
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Martha McPhee
Gorgeous Lies
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Martha
McPhee's first novel, Bright Angel Time,
was published in 1997 and her short fiction has appeared
in The New Yorker, Redbook, and Open
City. Her nonfiction has been published in The
New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Harper's
Bazaar, Vogue, Interview, and Real
Simple. She is the recipient of a 1998 National Endowment
for the Arts Grant and has been a fellow at both the MacDowell
and Yaddo artist colonies. She received her MFA from Columbia
University, where she has also taught in both the undergraduate
and graduate creative writing programs. She is co-author
with Jenny and Laura McPhee of Girls, a nonfiction
book. She lives in New York City with her daughter and
husband. |
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In
the 1970s, the media lavished attention on Anton Furey's
blended family and their utopian lifestyle. Now he's dying
and his "tribe" comes to reconcile with the
patriarch and the life he created for all of them. Martha
McPhee, in this sequel to her first novel, Bright Angel
Time, paints a portrait of an era and a family that scrutinizes
the obligations of love. |
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The
Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien was a pivotal
book for my own writing. It is the story of an Irish girl's
youth and when I read it, it made me want to write. I
was 20 years old and had always wanted to write but did
not trust that I had stories to tell. When I read the
first in O'Brien's trilogy, The Country Girl, I
realized that stories can be written from the point of
view of a child and also be for adults. Also, her style
was deceptively simple -- writing a book seemed possible.
Though I learned while writing my first book that the
key word is "deceptive," writing is difficult,
and writing from the point of view of a child while retaining
the distance and perspective of an adult is a high-wire
act. As a result I kept rereading O'Brien's book, studying
it, taking it apart to see how it was made. In that way
I also taught myself a lot about writing -- noticing the
small details, using them to illuminate the big ones.
The interest sparked by O'Brien's child narrator lead
me to many other writers using a child's voice: This
Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff; Anywhere But Here
by Mona Simpson; Stop Time by Frank Conroy; Huckleberry
Finn by Mark Twain; Monkeys by Susan Minot;
What Maisie Knew by Henry James. I loved them all,
studying them as carefully as I studied O'Brien, discovering
that there was no doubt in my mind that I would be a writer.
My first novel was Bright Angel Time narrated by
eight-year-old Kate Cooper. Edna O'Brien remains one of
my favorite writers. |
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Brad Watson
The Heaven of Mercury
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Brad
Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi, studied
at Mississippi State University, and received an MFA from
the University of Alabama. He has been a newspaper reporter
on the Alabama and Florida Gulf coasts, an English instructor,
and a creative writing teacher at Harvard. His short fiction
has been published in Story, Black Warrior Review,
Greensboro Review, and Dog Stories. His
short story collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men,
won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He and his family live in
Pensacola, Florida, where he teaches at the University
of West Florida. |
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Set
deep in the American South, this debut novel spans 80
years in the life of Mercury, Mississippi, as it evolves
from sleepy backwater to a small city. Mercury's changing
landscape and cast of characters enrich the tale of the
lifelong and complicated friendship between Finus Bates
and his love, Birdie Wells. |
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