The New Yorker has announced their once-a-decade-or-so "20 Under 40" list of the best young fiction writers.
Yes campers, once in a decade. If you make the list shelf space in Big Apple bookstores is guaranteed for a few years to come; if you don't, it will probably be too late by the time the next one comes around for most so best focus on getting the Pulitzer Prize instead. All but two of the authors on the list, Ms. Obreht and Ms. Russell, are in their 30s.
Some fine authors in the group below, many of whom have already picked-up major literary prizes. Where will they be in ten years time in the literary pecking order?
A few of the authors on the last list in 1999' list have done pretty well. Junot Díaz was the author in the late noughties of a popular story collection, “Drown,” but “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was still eight years away!
Jonathan Franzen Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, also on the 1999 list, have made a living out of writing. Can't track who the others were at the moment so we can only hope that they are not waiting tables somewhere.
The nominated authors are:
- Chimamanda Ngogi Adichie
(Half of a Yellow Sun
, The Thing Around Your Neck
)
- Chris Adrian
A Better Angel
- Daniel Alarcon
, War by Candlelight
)
- David Bezmozgis
)
- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
, Madeleine Is Sleeping
)
- Joshua Ferris
,
)
- Jonathan Safran Foer
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- Nell Freudenberger
,
Lucky Girls
- Rivka Galchen
)
- Nicole Krauss
(The History of Love, Man Walks into a Room
, Great House)
- Yiyun Li
, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers)
- Dinaw Mengestu
, How to Read the Air)
- Philipp Meyer
)
- C.E. Morgan
(All the Living
- Tea Obreht
)
- Z.Z. Packer
)
- Karen Russell
(St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
)
- Salvatore Scibona
(The End
- Gary Shteyngart
, The Russian Debutante's Handbook
, Super Sad True Love Story
)
- Wells Tower
)
