Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for "Everyman," his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.
"It's such a slim volume," PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling said Monday in a statement, "and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivializes, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self."
The runners-up were Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum," Deborah Eisenberg's "Twilight of the Superheroes," Amy Hempel's "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" and Edward P. Jones' "All Aunt Hagar's Children."
Roth, who will receive $15,000, is the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner, having received it in 1994 for "Operation Shylock" and in 2001 for "The Human Stain." The PEN/Faulkner Award was founded in 1980.