The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list of fictionists worth watching is likely to become a who’s who in publishing over the next decade. At least, that’s what happened in 1999, the last time the magazine put together a similar list. The list that The New Yorker cooked up that year really were watching: in fact, a lot of us have been watching most of them ever since. It included Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Nathan Englander and Junot Díaz. According to The New York Times:

The process began in January, when editors in the fiction department started brainstorming. By e-mail they asked literary agents, publishers and other writers to suggest potential candidates.

The editors eventually whittled the possibilities down to a shortlist of roughly 40 eligible writers. A few prominent fiction writers, including Colson Whitehead and Dave Eggers, were slightly too old to make the cut, Ms. Treisman said.

“It’s a little agonizing,” said Willing Davidson, associate fiction editor at The New Yorker. “We’re trying to think of what has this person already done, but also, what are they doing right now that we can put in the magazine?”

According to The New York Times, here’s the 2010 list:

They are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

The list will be published in The New Yorker’s double fiction issue on June 7th. Meanwhile, The Observer offers up several lists of people who, for various reasons, you won’t be seeing in The New Yorker’s list.

Postscript: I love that Ward Six has put together their own list: The Top Ten Authors Over 80! Some significant names missing -- Milan Kundera and Gabriel García Márquez among them. Still, a terrific idea.