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The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Posted By Christopher Guerin On In books & writing,now read this! | 11 Comments

Last year, I wrote a piece here called “The Future of Literary Fiction” [1] , which included a list of authors that I regularly search for at Amazon.com for their upcoming novels or short story collections. In essence, it’s a personal version, exclusive of age or nationality, of other recent attempts to list the best writers of fiction. I referenced the list of authors in the 1999 “Future of American Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, which has held up extremely well. Now, TNY has published a new list of “20 under 40” [2], which doesn’t pretend to be a “best of” list as much as a grouping of representative voices for our current culture. This has generated a number of alternate lists, including this one at The Guardian of British authors [3] and this tiresome and nearly incoherent screed by Lee Siegel [4] in The Observer informing us that fiction is dead. Nonsense.

I like lists, obviously, but I think it’s pointless to confine them to age or nationality. Why leave out Dave Eggers because he’s a year too old? So, here’s my own list again, somewhat expanded, after a year’s additional reading. Sixty writers still writing great fiction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Kazuo Ishiguro

Thomas Pynchon

Lorrie Moore

Martin Amis

Annie Dillard

Ian McEwan

T.C. Boyle

Milan Kundera

George Saunders

Nicholson Baker

Jeffrey Eugenides

Nathan Englander

Shirley Hazzard

Salman Rushdie

Jane Smiley

David Mitchell

Francine Prose

Sarah Waters

Jim Harrison

Will Self

Thom Jones

E. L. Doctorow

William Trevor

Zadie Smith

Donald Antrim

Tim O’Brian

Alice Munro

Philip Roth

Haruki Murakami

Ryu Murakami

Joyce Carol Oates

Victor Pelevin

Jonathan Franzen

Kevin Brockmeier

John Barth

Jhumpa Lahiri

Robert Coover

Denis Johnson

Richard Powers

William T. Vollmann

Cynthia Ozick

Michel Faber

Stuart Dybek

Ha Jin

Rivka Galchen

Akira Yoshimura

Charles D’Ambrosio

Alexander Hemon

Antonya Nelson

A. M. Homes

Annie Proulx

Maile Meloy

Yoko Ogawa

Jean Echenoz

Janet Frame

Geoff Dyer

Deborah Eisenberg

Jonathan Littell

Mary Gaitskill

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Christopher Guerin [8]

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.
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