Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” a hard-hitting and comic novel set in New York City about a Puerto Rican family’s search for a missing girl, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Deesha Philyaw struggled to find a publisher for what became her acclaimed debut “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.”.

It began in 2018 as a conversation between authors Jami Attenberg and Anne Gisleson: a writing “boot camp” in which each would write 1,000 words a day for 14 days.