Books

NEW YORK – In the ever-changing anteroom of the Great American Novel, young just got younger, and what it means to be an American broadened significantly.

Thursday night, Granta magazine announced the lineup for its second Best of Young American Novelists issue at New York's Housing Works Bookstore.

There are no perfect crystal balls in the literary world, but the Granta list has become nearly infallible. In 1983, it launched its first salvo at predicting the future with the Best of Young British Novelists, tipping Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as voices to watch.

The first American list, issued in 1996, contained a few names that have yet to emerge again, such as Robert O'Connor and Fae Myenne Ng , but there are a striking number of bull's-eyes: Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and Edwidge Danticat among them.

This year, by dropping the age cutoff from 40 to 35, the Granta judges have culled a diverse and entirely new group of names. Five of the authors were born outside of the United States, two in the former Soviet Union. One of them, Gabe Hudson, grew up in Austin.

Judge A.M. Homes, a novelist and memoirist, says she sees a sea-change at play in American fiction.

"What it is to be American given each of the backgrounds of these people, it's not straightforward," she says.

"Many of them are looking at whether you can be an American and all these other things at once."

Novels about immigrant experiences are hardly new to American literature. In the introduction to 1999's Best American Stories of the Century, John Updike wrote: "Immigration is a central strand in America's collective story."

But if the Granta list is any gauge, that story line has shifted, with America becoming the remembering ground for the great boomerang of world events rather than the dream itself.

Daniel Alarcón, for instance, was born in Peru, grew up in Alabama speaking Spanish at home, and now lives in the Bay Area and writes in English about events happening in Lima.

"I think what you see here is that we want our interpreters of the world to also be natives of America, too," he said last week.

It's not just the writers from ethnic backgrounds looking outside the United States, though. Jess Row taught English in Hong Kong, an experience he brings to bear on his collection of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu.

John Wray drew on his mother's history in Austria in his debut novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, a tale about the aftermath of fascism in Europe.

Judge Meghan O'Rourke, a poet and editor at Slate.com, notes that this is a big shift from fiction of recent generations.

"A lot of these writers are really conscious of America not as a continent adrift on its own but as a force being inflected by the world and inflecting itself on the world."

As a result, this list is not without a certain political bent. Two blistering satirists, New Yorkers Mr. Hudson and Gary Shteyngart, take on the recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nearly a quarter of the list was born in or lives in Washington, D.C. More than half of the writers attended an Ivy League university. Five studied at Harvard.

Ms. Homes wasn't bothered by the implied privilege. "For the longest time, the Ivy League schools were not the schools that turned out fiction writers. I think it's interesting if there is more of a place for young writers now, and, of course, a broader mix of people got to go to college in this generation."

During the years this group of novelists attended college, political correctness also was at its height, leading to a closer examination of identity politics through the prisms of race, gender and ethnicity.

Critics have argued that this was an indulgence and a balkanizing force. But the Granta list bears out that for every excess of introspection, the meditation on cultural roots that the PC movement encouraged has led to profound acts of imagination.

Take, for instance, the great tradition of Jewish novelists, so long powered by first-generation experience with the Holocaust.

Two generations removed, young novelists continue to engage with the horror of the Holocaust and the diaspora that followed. It shows up in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, Judy Budnitz and Nicole Krauss.

The judges include novelist Edmund White, City Lights Bookstore buyer Paul Yamazaki, Granta owner Sigrid Rausing, editor Matt Weiland, Ms. O'Rourke and Ms. Homes.

Ms. Homes was left off the magazine's 1996 list, but she was included in a similar list of the "20 best under 40" published in The New Yorker a few years later, an experience she remembered while making her selection here.

"All prizes are, to a degree, arbitrary," she says, "they are the mind and mood of the people making the decisions that hour that day.

"But it's tricky with young novelists, since they're still developing. Five years from now, we'll see some of these people won't have done much, and others may be the leading lights. But all of them are on the cusp of something."

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Daniel Alarcón

Judy Budnitz

Kevin Brockmeier

Christopher Coake

Anthony Doerr

Jonathan Safran Foer

Nell Freudenberger

Olga Grushin

Dara Horn

Gabe Hudson

Uzodinma Iweala

Nicole Krauss

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Yiyun Li

Maile Meloy

ZZ Packer

Jess Row

Karen Russell

Akhil Sharma

Gary Shteyngart

John Wray