GRANTA & NEW AMERICAN LITERARY TALENT

THIS week the British literary magazine Granta, which once printed A.A. Milne and Sylvia Plath and has had an agenda-setting role since its rebirth in 1979, will publish its second "Best of Young American Novelists" issue. This time the list is younger (by design) and less Caucasian (by judge selection) than the talked-about '96 list that included Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and 18 others.This kind of list, of course, always provokes a lot of tea-leaf reading — as well as high-minded dismissals of its "problematic" nature. This year, one source of discussion is how many of the list's 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days? (Some things seem never to change, though: More than half of the chosen writers live in New York City, and the only Southland writer is Maile Meloy, who lives in Los Angeles.)"All of us agreed on one thing," Ian Jack, the magazine's editor wrote in the issue's introduction. "Ethnicity, migration and 'abroad' had replaced social class as a source of tension…. " The Scotland-born Jack points out that a similar transition occurred in British fiction in the '80s — what Salman Rushdie called, in a famous essay, "The Empire Strikes Back."After the India-born Rushdie won the 1981 Booker Prize for "Midnight's Children," Japan-born Kazuo Ishiguro, Nigeria's Ben Okri and Sri Lanka-born Michael Ondaatje won the award, and several showed up on Granta's "Young British Novelists" lists. Foreign-born and "nonwhite" writers have won the Booker, in fact, since the award's very earliest years.But Jack sees the U.S. as ahead of Britain on this score."Mostly because of the empire, we had an early experience of the phenomenon America's now having," he said. "But what's happening in the States is much broader than what happened here — really what happened here came out of India, and one or two parts of Africa."