from the PEN America award

PEN America is both a prestigious book award and activist organization advancing human rights and  freedom of speech.

Their annual book prizes are a big deal in the book world, and their work spotlighting authors and journalist threatened, jailed or silenced around the world has made a real difference (while also enduring some controversies).

Over the past decade, several short novels have made PEN's nominee list. We've collected them here.

A few of the best things about the PEN awards:

• It's a prestigious literary prize that also focuses on freedom of speech
  and human rights worldwide
• Each year, the prize includes several categories, like science writing, poetry and books in translation, and categories can shift year to year, depending on the urgency and focus.
• Like other major awards, acclaimed authors are judges, diversifying the nominating process.

PEN America has evolved to prioritize more diversity in their awards and often includes books overlooked by other awards. Authors of short novels nominated in the past ten years include Yiyun Li, Tomas Moniz, Noor Naga, Juan Cardenas and several others.

Take a look at the Shortist list of PEN America-nominated short novels.

The Shortish Project is an evolving database of new and classic short novels from publishers big and small. Find the latest. Discover hidden gems. Search by author, book title or ISBN here.

Or lean in and do a random scroll through the full Shortish database (600 titles or so)!