For Roth, a 3rd PEN/Faulkner Win

· Charles D'Ambrosio for "The Dead Fish Museum."

Roth will receive $15,000, the other finalists get $5,000 each. They will be honored May 12 at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

All three judges -- the others were Debra Magpie Earling and John Dufresne -- are the authors of stories as well as novels, but the fact that the shorter form dominated the list of finalists wasn't a conscious decision.

"We all realized at the same time that we'd picked all these short stories," Dufresne said.

Conscious or not, however, both he and Earling thought the emphasis might be a good thing. "We just don't hear that much about short-story collections," Earling said. Yet a work like Jones's "In the Blink of God's Eye" -- which opens "All Aunt Hagar's Children" -- is "so rich in history, so rich in scope," that the term "short story" doesn't adequately convey the reading experience it offers.

"Maybe there should be another word," Earling said.

"Maybe this will be an alert to publishers," Dufresne said.

Or maybe not. Publishers, he explained, will tell you that story collections don't sell, and "I'm sure they're right."

As for the novel that won: "Everyman," at 182 small-format pages, isn't far in length from "Goodbye, Columbus," the novella that made Roth's reputation in 1959. But its author has the radically different perspective that comes with age.

"In the couple of years before 'Everyman' was written, I had been to the funerals of about four close friends," Roth said. With illness and death much on his mind, he came back from Saul Bellow's funeral in the spring of 2005 "and began writing."

His idea was to build a narrative around a man's illnesses: to see them not as isolated events "but as the trajectory carrying you to the end of life." In a 60- or 70-page first draft, he dealt only with his protagonist's illnesses, which begin with a childhood hernia operation and end with the heart disease that finally kills him.

Then he asked himself: "Who did this happen to?"