the new yorker 20 writers under 40 2010 poll

btw i am totally NOT AT ALL JEALOUS of the fact that another 24-yr-old is on the list but TEA OBREHT SUCKS

sorry thats Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie up there

only know two of those names.

also that was mean, the only thing i have ever read by obreht is the story she had in the nyer (wait a minute) a few months ago about the tiger? and it was OK but it was not that good.

for some reason i thought zz packer was much older

i liked zz packers book of stories when i read it a few years ago but i dont think i remember anything about it now.

voted chris adrian

looking fwd 2 the new gary shteyngart book but havent ttly dug his previous stuff

i really liked zz packers short story collection too although the story about going crazy at yale is memorable to me

also i feel like constitutionally obliged to mention that rivka galchen's atmospheric disturbances is a terrific book & that everyone shld read it

i dig zz packer; i feel like she's been one of the 20 under 40 before? maybe i made that up. also, fuck these v accomplished people.

^^ <3 haters

Ferris and Foer are the only ones I've read, but I'd like to read more by both before forming an opinion. Have meant to read Shteyngart. Freudenberger and Packer are the only other ones I've heard of. Oh wait, Adichie's the one that won the Booker a couple years ago, right?

"wells tower" is a fantastic name

shit, tho': he's 37?

I am reading a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book right now! (her short story collection) I haven't read books by more than two of the other writers but she is really great.

are these all fiction writers or something? i never read fiction :(

i really should but

they write about people who don't exist! weirdos

of the ones I've read: Shteyngart > Galchen > Ferris > Foer

was going to ask where's junot diaz, but apparently he's 41. i thought he was younger.

they write about people who don't exist! weirdos

― The Clegg Effect (Tracer Hand), Thursday, June 3, 2010 2:40 AM Bookmark

i know

looking fwd 2 the new gary shteyngart book but havent ttly dug his previous stuff

The new Shteyngart is really great and includes a lot of humor that will be of interest to Internet Users. I really enjoyed it.

Kinda complicated feelings about a lot of the rest of these.

(Haha wait, that makes it sound like I dislike people on here, which is totally not what I mean.)

i was surprised by the omission of adam haslett but i guess hes turning 40 this year

also nell freudenberger kinda doesnt seem to warrant inclusion in a list like this but mb thats cuz i dont like her idk

is it just me or does it seem like successful authors usually have unusual names. like is there no room for james joyce anymore. seems to be a theme in academia too.

a bunch of these names are really ordinary!

I would say 53-64% (±5%) of the names on that list are unusual

nabs, yr tumblr post pretty much sold me on the Shteyngart -- i'll be picking up a copy when it comes out

is it just me or does it seem like successful authors usually have unusual names. like is there no room for james joyce anymore. seems to be a theme in academia too.

― real eyes realize real truffle fries (dyao), Friday, June 4, 2010 12:57 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

definitely dont want to accuse you of racism, or anyhting, but

Tower's short story collection is okay. It's hard to really be impressive with that kind of tough-guy short fiction, I guess.

I think all the essays/articles I've read from him (in Esquire, Outside, etc.) revolve around the dysfunctional relationship with his brother. Not very interesting the first time and less interesting when it just gets transposed to "and now we hate each other in Venice."

maybe tough-guy isn't the right phrase, but there's always another short story collection being praised by the NYT/etc. that winds up reading like an alt-country album, and I already own Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.

definitely dont want to accuse you of racism, or anyhting, but

― max, Friday, June 4, 2010 1:18 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah my statement definitely codes as racist :\ - I think I'll just stop here before I dig myself any deeper

I'll just end by saying that one of my professors had the first name of 'pericles'

(and he wasn't greek afaict)

milo z wells tower's debut collection is not that much like an alt country album

if only wilco had songs about vikings. or at which they were vikings, i cant remember.

I would totally like and listen to wilco if either or both of those statements were true

maybe there is an uncle tupelo song about vikings

valhalla i am coming

Down here, where we're at
All we do is sit out on the porch
And play our songs, and nothing's wrong
Sometimes vikings come around, they all sing along

I've been talking to people to try and get some violent reaction about how it's A CRIME that so-and-so isn't on the list. So far I haven't heard any "it's a crime," but I've been suggested: Nam Le, Marisa Silver, Anthony Doerr, Adam Haslett, Olga Grushin, Sana Krasikov, and Lara Vapnyar.

A good number of those were on the Granta "young novelists" lists, but I am somehow annoyed with that list for including at least one person who had not yet even published a novel. I mean, if not-yet-published novelists were in contention, I have lots of those to recommend.

Also learned that one of my oldest friends was apparently close to consideration for this list, and got cut mid-process, which has got to be a giant bummer. :(

i am slowly coming to terms with the idea that i will never get put on one of these lists for achievements in writing video games about murderous robots

Olga Grushin

is her new novel any good? i ~think~ i liked her 1st novel although it was mb a little clumsy and showy?

U are in video game scripting? My wife too-- until the company's backer pulled out anyway. Fuckin' cool work.

the best stories in the wells tower collection were the couple about kids/ adolescents, and the viking one.
Shteyngart my favorite novelist in a long time so i'm voting for him, but would like to read more of these people.

Btw, Nabisco, Nathan Englander, in addition to maybe already being 40, was on the list the last time the New Yorker did one, in '99.

thk god eggers is 40

Whatever happened to Marisha Pessl?

none of these people are really writers

xpost she sucks?

Yeah, I mean, I only got about 100 pages into Special Topics in Calamity Physics before it really started to annoy me, but I'm surprised her name hasn't come up since that book was so lauded.

that's true, ppl really did love her for a while there

Haven't read as many of these as I thought but I think Ferris is pretty special.

I've been talking to people to try and get some violent reaction about how it's A CRIME that so-and-so isn't on the list.

i just thought about maile meloy! its not really a crime (in lower or upper case) but she definitely 'means more to me' than any of the writers itl - a few of whom i think are kind of hack-y really - & i think shes achieved a lot more than most of these dudez

I'm not really taken with Meloy, but I haven't spent nearly enough time with her. That reminds me -- not that I'd really push for her, but a lot of people really love Myla Goldberg, right? (Or did people go off with her second novel?)

The flush of love for Pessl seemed really short-lived, and to be honest ... I don't mean to come at this in a really cynical way, but I think Rivka Galchen has supplanted her as the more literary/highbrow young woman for people who like science. That sounds really dumb to say, but still.

By the way, I just looked at Pessl's wikipedia entry, and my first thought is that she is within two months of my age (and went to the same college as me?!), but boy is she apparently fancier and more important. She:

- worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers
- married a hedge fund manager
- filed for divorce last year
- with her husband, "sued the AKA Sutton Place hotel for $50,000 after their three cats were allegedly poisoned by rat poison. They were staying in the hotel after a fire damaged their Tribeca apartment."

^^ THIS IS CLEARLY A LAW & ORDER EPISODE, RIGHT? Young novelist and hedge-fund manager, staying in a hotel after a fire in their Tribeca place? One of them winds up dead, police suspect the hotel manager ("sure, they sued us over the damn cats, but I didn't kill anybody!"), and then it turns out to be some sordid thing involving crazy book editors?

That reminds me -- not that I'd really push for her, but a lot of people really love Myla Goldberg, right?

I hope what reminded you was the name "Meloy."

the family Meloy, isn't it? yes, I went from Maile --> her brother --> wrote a creepy song about Myla

Maily Meloy Myla Moley

where's tao lin

Myla is a year or two younger than me I think which means when her new novel hits she won't be forty yet. I think she told me it drops next year...? Anyway, I think it's gonna kick ass. But I guess I can see why she isn't on this list since she hasn't had one out in awhile.

And afaic Bee Season was tremendous enough to still be gettin' respect for.

Oh! Had never heard of Maile Meloy before today, so I didn't know she was Colin's sister.

where's tao lin

Haha yes I actually had this thought, too, but you know, it's the New Yorker.

I could sort of imagine Eustace Tilley reading Tao Lin and saying "I like this better when we published this the first time, in the freaking 1980s"

I can't type today. You know what I mean. He has certain things in common with 80s "minimalist" / "K-Mart Realist" stuff they published.

is eustace tilley alt? [via monocle]

is it just me or does it seem like successful authors usually have unusual names. like is there no room for james joyce anymore. seems to be a theme in academia too.

― real eyes realize real truffle fries (dyao)

there is possibly something in this, tho clearly some of this list are from ethnicities where it's difficult to determine the rarity of their names

maybe it trends w/ 'creative' ppl feeling the need to gift name recognition to their progeny, kinda like a personal brand equiv of a trust fund

the great writers of the previous century tended to be from a fairly orthodox bourgie background and their parents' lack of nomenclatural invention reflects this

What's the point of keeping this to authors "writing primarily for an American audience"? (Thinking about this while reading the Zadie Smith essay collection last night.)

Also here's the 1999 list:

- Sherman Alexie
- Donald Antrim
- Ethan Canin
- Michael Chabon
- Edwige Danticat
- Junot Diaz
- Tony Earley
- Nathan Englander
- Jeffrey Eugenides
- Jonathan Franzen
- Allegra Goodman
- A.M. Homes
- Matthew Klam
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Chang-Rae Lee
- Rick Moody
- Antonya Nelson
- George Saunders
- William T. Vollmann
- David Foster Wallace

Interesting that I've heard of (which is to say, I at least recognize the names of) everyone on that list except for Earley and Nelson. Not sure what that means, though, since I don't remember how many I'd heard of at the time. (I can say with some degree of certainty that I'd heard of Alexie, Eugenides, Lee, Moody, and Wallace. The rest, I dunno.)

also i feel like constitutionally obliged to mention that rivka galchen's atmospheric disturbances is a terrific book & that everyone shld read it

couldn't finish it and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for meta unreliable narrator weirdness

Have any of the authors on the 2010 list had movie adaptations, besides Foer?

From the 1999 list, Alexie had Smoke Signals (1998), Eugenides had The Virgin Suicides (1999), Moody had The Ice Storm (1999), and Chabon's Wonder Boys was right around the corner (2000).

And Franzen adaptation is just about to come out iirc.

Oh sorry, I meant at the time of the list's creation. Just trying to get a bead on whether the authors in the 1999 list were better known at the time than those on the 2010 list.

Also, The Ice Storm was 1997, not 1999.

Oh right, sorries.

Safran Foer and Shteyngart are the only ones on this list I've heard of...

couldn't finish it and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for meta unreliable narrator weirdness

oh man really? why? :(((

I dunno, just seemed like it was going in circles to me. I felt for the guy -- it was tragic I guess? -- but after a while it got frustrating to follow him

yah i really liked the cryptic puzzle-like parts of the book

c.e. morgan seems p insufferable btw - not that that really means much - but coupled w/ the fact that i tht her book was thoughtless and lame im kinda annoyed she got incl itl

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/43434-fsg-to-publish-collection-of-new-yorker-s-20-under-40-.html

What surprises me most is that the NYer is really presenting this as some carefully selected list -- "the best writers" -- but in a live chat on the site, Deborah Triesman is really up-front about having to provide a story, which practically acts as a buy-in: someone asks her why Maile Meloy's not on there, and her answer's just plain "it didn't work out for her to give us a story."

I'm not entirely sure what my point is, apart from the fact that either they should be committed to weaseliness and just say "nope, these are the absolute best, for real," or they should be open about it being the best they can collect.

I mean, I know it's the important once-a-decade NYer list, so "the best" and "the best we can get" are not super-far from one another, but they're still different things.

Am I the only one who read 40 2010 as 90210?

Yeah, I mean, the NYer can pretty much get whoever they want. It also sounds like they worked pretty hard to accommodate authors and get something publishable from them -- which is why there's a bunch of exerpts.

I listened to the podcast interview with the editors and I was surprised by how much editing goes into NYer fiction -- like the author has to do a lot of rewrites and stuff. I kind of assumed they just accepted a story and then published it.

They're that way with the gag cartoons too. You present a bunch of fully-finished pitch pieces, they buy one of them, you have to do 4 or 5 more fully-finished versions of the sale for them to choose from.

The New Yorker staff: being dicks because they can.

I wonder if they do that for poetry. It always annoyed me that Dana Goodyear got poems published in the magazine when she was Remnick's assistant.

I've read about half of them; so far my favorite is Joshua Ferris. I really liked the way his last novel started out, but then it became a bit too abstract and meandering for me.

the shteyngart has to be an excerpt of his new novel -- it's really good imo

i liked the galchen a lot too

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

still havent finished this issue yet

i disliked the jonathan safran foer story.

ahhhh i was just going to post about how i didnt hate it as much as i felt like i should have!

i mean it seemed like a sort of mash note to his wife? and i meant to hate it, but it was kind of earnest and sweet and i was like, oh, jonathan safran foer, there is already so much energy being expended to hate you, i will refrain.

the sentence about "i couldn't even make a sandwich without putting on a record" or whatever made me laugh/recognize but otherwise i don't know. i think that's the only safran foer i've ever read.

xp see i didn't even know that people hated him!

young brooklyn writer successful off the back of quirky novels abt feelings and whatnot, plus a book about, lol, vegetarianism

anyway of the handful ive read i havent been blown away yet. i liked the rivka galchen one. ILL KEEP YOU ALL POSTED.

rivka galchen one was v good, i thought. tying to remember any of the other ones...

i keep trying to read the c.e. morgan one and not being able to get into it.

( behind-the-literature FUN FICTION/FACT: the character "David" in Rivka's story -- the one who used to ghost-write a column for Hustler -- is rather similar -- fictionally speaking, of course! -- to the author of this book, about a character who used to ghost-write a column for a (fictional) porno mag: http://www.amazon.com/Serialist-Novel-David-Gordon/dp/1439158487 )

I was in a class with Daniel Alarcón. Nice guy.

i disliked the jonathan safran foer story.

I actually loved it, but I am a straight-up sucker for time compression. Like that Google Super Bowl ad? Made me cry multiple times.

I liked the Ferris, too.

Liked the J S Foer story a lot, to my surprise! Was turned off by the excerpts from Todo Es Iluminado in NYer years ago, thus didn't read the novels, felt kind of securely smug about not having done so, but maybe I was wrong?

The Ferris story, just like "Then We Came to the End," was tightly and very SMOOTHLY written but ran out of ideas 2/3 through and ended with the easy gesture, thus ruining itself. Or worse, the easy gesture was the goal Ferris was going for all along, in which case I think that a real gift for reeling out sentences has been wasted on a dude with rotten judgment.

Shteyngart story was my fav in the issue, looking fwd to more stuff from chris adrian tho cuz i really liked 'the children's hospital'

I really like the one Ferris novel I've read (Then We Came To The End) but don't really feel qualified to vote in this. I will totally read something by whoever wins (except that'll end up being Foer argh).

i disliked the jonathan safran foer story.

― horseshoe, Monday, June 28, 2010 7:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ahhhh i was just going to post about how i didnt hate it as much as i felt like i should have!

― max, Monday, June 28, 2010 7:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

quit at the third paragraph tbh

my wife had read the whole thing and supported me in that decision

are these all fiction writers or something? i never read fiction :(

they write about people who don't exist! weirdos

Stories about people who don't exist, that's what films are for (I have 2 hours, not 2 weeks).

loooooooooool

you'd have more time if you quit ILX

booming post

man i haven't liked ANY of the stuff they've published by these nudniks so far. mostly i just want to yell at these various fictional people that the possible reason their various fictional spouses and loved ones have left (or become estranged) is because they are horrible, banal, cliched fictional people.

i sound like shakey mo. :/

reading novels at work doesn't seem doable, but thx for the suggestation

BTW Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is the actual correct answer to this poll

Surprised not to see Ed Park on this list - he seems appropriate for it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Z Z Packer, 37; 0

tsk tsk

surprised by lack of love for rivka galchen, who i haven't read but seems to be the consensus "the one to like who's not famous" choice here

rereading drinking coffee elsewhere and its goooood

wait, I totally voted for Rivka!

I mean, it was a totally biased vote, but still, MY FAITH IN ILX POLLS HAS BEEN IRREVOCABLY SHATTERED

i did not vote at all, since at the time this poll appeared i had read, like, two of these people. but i was tempted to vote for zz packer.

just took atmospheric disturbances out from the library. irl consequences of ilx.

^it def moved to the next on my to-read list, also

in the middle of atmospheric disturbances now, it's dope.

i shld prob give drinking coffee elsewhere another go - i remember picking it up a while ago - maybe cuz she was on that granta list? and i read it but i cant remember anything abt it now

yeah i couldnt either, so i reread it, and it was great

Scibona's story is my favorite so far.

I don't want to start a new thread on Tao Lin because I know literally almost nothing about him, and this is one of the few ILX threads where he's been mentioned, so I'll ask here: what is the deal with this guy? Everyone seems to hate him.

try listening 2 his bookworm interview, it's a good place 2 start imo

or just search for his blog & skim thru, you'll get acquainted w/ his 'deal' p quick

I browsed through Richard Yates at the bookstore the other day with curiosity.

fyi i wld prob change my vote in this 2 rivka galchen tbqh

the blog I found seems to be 95% links to press about his work, not really very informative

also I can no longer process information that isn't filtered through the ILX hivemind

fwiw i hate this guy b/c the depth to his shallowness is all implied

Rivka Galchen interviewing Chris Adrian abt his new book (+ other stuff) - http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/2010/09/rivka-galchen-interviews-chris-adrian/#more-327

didnt realise that chris adrian was also a practicing pediatrician, talk abt an overachiever jeeeez

tao lin is the guy people thought was carles right?

yep

n/a, knowing you and your tastes, I think you might like Tao Lin. He's a deadpan agitator.

Here he is reading at an arty event my friend threw (she's in the flowery top and white skirt).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjcOK2T0lPo

Yiyun Li is actually rather wonderful, I am coming to realize.

I loved her story in the NYer. I am such a sucker for sad, quiet stories about sad, quiet characters. Then I realized she was also in an issue of Granta I have, and I enjoyed her essay which was nothing like her story.

I eventually read three or four of the stories in this issue and Gary Shteyngart was my favorite

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/09/courtney_love_wants_to_be_publ_1.html

http://therumpus.net/2010/09/tao-lin-on-the-cover-of-time/