Granta: Best Young American Novelists
Granta has issued a list of the Best of Young (Under-40) American Novelists. Judged by authors Patrick DeWitt, AM Homes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus, and publisher Sigrid Rausing, the list turns out to have a majority of women writers (13 to nine men). It is also diverse. The most striking thing about the list is how little its inhabitants might be said to have in common, as writers. Stylistically, they run the gamut, from a lyrical realist such as Emma Cline to an absurdist-complete-with-font-size changes such as Jesse Ball. We also have traditionally a “ambitious†novelist here, one who bit off a larger subject than he could chew: Garth Risk Hallberg, whose much-hyped City on Fire was a big tower of Babel kind of book. In Yaa Gyasi, too, we have someone working in the familiar mode of the big historical
novel. But this list also contains several novelists whose ambitions are more directed at form: Lauren Groff, whose Fates and Furies had a few structural fireworks, and Ottessa Moshfegh, who is devoted to avoiding traditional forms of literary satisfaction for the reader, such as plot and character development. And we have Ben Lerner, whose work usually stands in for the closest thing American literature has right now to a bona fide trend: autofiction.
