Karen Joy Fowler Wins PEN/Faulkner Prize

Karen Joy Fowler is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” which was our book club selection for July 2013.  The narrator is Rosemary Cooke, the 22 year old daughter of an Indiana University psychology professor who subjected his family to a psychological experiment when she was young.  The psychological community believed at the time that Chimps could be brought into a human family and raised as family members. When Rosemary was born an infant Chimp was brought into her family to become her twin.  The book describes the huge impact that experiment had on all members of the Cooke family.

Fowler’s book was chosen from more than 430 novels and short story collections published by American authors in 2013.