Several Random House titles and authors have received this year's PEN Literary Award. The award winners and finalists are as follows:

•PEN/Nabokov Award: Philip Roth
•Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation: Edith Grossman (translator of Gabriel García Márquez)
•Finalists for PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers: God Lives in St. Petersberg: And Other Stories by Tom Bissell and Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann
•PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize: Philip Gabriel for his translation of Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
•Finalist for PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction: Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria's Jewish Past With Its Last Wandering Shepherd by Sam Apple
•Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir: Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples by Dan Hofstadter

David Bodanis' Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World has won the 2006 Aventis General Prize, which celebrates the very best in popular science writing for adult readers. Since its founding in 1988, the prize has become one of the UK's most prestigious non-fiction literary prizes.

Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku was also shortlisted for this year's prize. Previous winners have included Stephen Hawking, Stephen J. Gould and Bill Bryson.

The New York Times has named Beloved by Toni Morrison as the Best American work of fiction published in the last 25 years. The runners-up are as follows:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels by John Updike (all four volumes also available in individual paperback format)

Click here for the full New York Times article.