GRANTA & NEW AMERICAN LITERARY TALENT

Eleven years ago, the British magazine Granta fired a shot heard round the world, or at least the literary world, by publishing a list of the 20 best American novelists under 40. Some of the small names on the list grew very big, like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. Other hot names at the time, like David Foster Wallace, were left off the list entirely. But as critics fussed about who was included and who was excluded, a clear snapshot of American writing emerged from the scuffle: It was clean, safe, and obsessed with realism. "The ghost of Raymond Carver haunted many American writers then," says Granta editor Ian Jack. "Not a bad ghost—far from it—but you can have too much of a good thing." The magazine's next issue, Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2, due out this spring, is once more devoted to the top young authors in America, and it seems times have changed.
Back in the prosperous year of 1996, America's bubble had yet to burst. A war in Iraq had come and gone from our national attention as quickly as a video game. Only about 20 percent of adults used the Internet, and two Stanford Ph.D. students had just begun a research project called "Google." We weren't living in a global village yet, and it showed in our literature. "Writing was much more 'American' then—it was devoted to depicting the U.S.A.," says Jack. Most of the 1996 Granta winners concerned their novels with their hometowns, describing them in clear and sparse prose. For example, Sherman Alexie's short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven featured inhabitants of the Spokane Indian Reservation where he was raised; Washington State native David Guterson set Snow Falling on Cedars near Puget Sound; and Eugenides grew up in Grosse Point, Michigan, the affluent suburban-Detroit backdrop for The Virgin Suicides.
Now, novelists in the U.S., like many filmmakers nominated for Academy Awards this year, seem to find their inspiration overseas. "Today so many young American writers were born and raised abroad—China, Africa, Asia, Latin America—and they have different concerns and experiences," says Jack. But even Americans born here are worried about issues that extend well beyond the borders of the United States: war, terrorism, global warming, outsourcing, and immigration. "America seems part of a wider world now in a way it didn't then, and also much less certain of itself," says Jack. "That comes through in the writing."
Among the 21 new winners, there are certainly many authors with a global perspective, including hot properties Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, and Gary Shteyngart; critical darlings Olga Grushin, Daniel Alarcon, and Uzodinma Iweala; and lesser known lights Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Jess Row.