Creative writing professor Tobias Wolff’s first novel, Old School, a book that an Esquire reviewer called “an elegant ode to writers, and to writing,” was selected as a finalist for this year’s Pen/Faulkner Award. Wolff and ZZ Packer, a former Stegner Fellow, were among four authors recognized by Pen/Faulkner in addition to the 2004 winner, John Updike. Packer was chosen as a finalist for her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

The widely acclaimed Old School, set in a New England prep academy in the 1960s, tells how a boy’s yearning for acceptance through a literary competition leads to self-realization.

Wolff won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1985 for his novella The Barracks Thief.