Thursday, June 03, 2010

40 is the new 26

So the New York Times announced The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list. Do we really need an article about an article? Why not just wait for the magazine to print the freaking list? Usually, this kind of hijinks is saved for the hard-hitting venues, like Access Hollywood's exclusive "Inside People's 50 Most Beautiful People List." But anyway, since it's obviously not a secret anymore, here are the picks for the top 20 young go-getters of fiction:
  • 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
  • Wells Tower, 37
Of the 20, I've only read one extensively (Joshua Ferris). So I can't really get excited one way or another about the actual inclusions. But I find their ages very interesting. Only two of them are younger than I am. This means there's still time to produce that great work of fiction I haven't managed to produce in almost 30 years. Nice! See ya, Orson Welles watermark.

1 comment:

S. said...

Hmm. The only one of the bunch I've read is Jonathan Safran Foer, and I got only a few chapters into Everything Is Illuminated before putting it aside and not getting back to it. Bad use of dialect.

...oh, wait, he also had a Playboy article about collecting blank paper from famous writers that wasn't bad, albeit a bit gimmicky. (It's over here, albeit with some formatting issues, if that's of interest. SFW.)