Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists [Paperback]

The third volume of Grantas renowned and prescient, Best of Young American Novelists

Every ten years,Grantadevotes an issue to new American fiction by writers under the age of forty, showcasing the young novelists deemed to be the best of their generation  writers of remarkable achievement and promise.

In 1997 and 2007 we picked out such luminaries as Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Lorrie Moore, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell and Gary Shteyngart.

In this special issue, we bring youGrantasBest of Young American Novelists of 2017: twenty-one outstanding writers, each able to capture the preoccupations of modern America.

Jesse Ball, Halle Butler, Emma Cline, Joshua Cohen, Mark Doten, Jen George, Rachel B. Glaser, Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Garth Risk Hallberg, Greg Jackson, Sana Krasikov, Catherine Lacey, Ben Lerner, Karan Mahajan, Anthony Marra, Dinaw Mengestu, Ottessa Moshfegh, Chinelo Okparanta, Esm? Weijun Wang, Claire Vaye Watkins

These are the novelists you will soon be reading, chosen by panel of judges who are themselves acclaimed writers: Patrick deWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus and Sigrid Rausing. The list business is not as sparklingly new as it was whenGrantasat in judgment on young British novelists for the first time in 1983 (Amis, Rushdie, McEwan). But it continues to fascinate, partly because it holds the promise of hours of good reading, and partly because by taking snapshots every 10 years the lists highlight the way the novelist's eye has shifted focus over time. What leaps out of the new list, as theGrantajudges have commented, is a heavy emphasis on things foreign... Despite the disparities in their birthplaces and in the settings they chose for their tales, the six writers profiled here out of the 21 agree on one thing: in the last analysis, differences of voice and location are cosmetic; what matters ml£"