Granta, a quarterly literary magazine founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University, devotes an issue to new American fiction once every decade. Their latest issue features the “Best of Young American Novelists of 2017”—“twenty-one outstanding authors who capture the preoccupations of modern America.”

This list includes Jesse Ball, Halle Butler, Emma Cline, Joshua Cohen, Mark Doten, Jen George, Rachel B. Glaser, Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Garth Risk Hallberg, Greg Jackson, Sana Krasikov, Catherine Lacey, Ben Lerner, Karan Mahajan, Anthony Marra, Dinaw Mengestu, Ottessa Moshfegh, Chinelo Okparanta, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Claire Vaye Watkins. The issue showcases the work of young novelists chosen by a panel of judges including Patrick deWitt, A. M. Holmes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus, and Sigrid Rausing.

Literary Hub interviewed six of the novelists featured in the issue, including Catherine Lacey, Jesse Ball, Karan Mahajan, Chinelo Okparanta, Anthony Marra, and Sana Krasikov. Many of them, incidentally, describe the American novel as a “myth”—and, as Marra puts it, “a misunderstanding of greatness.”

Michelle Dean, on the other hand, argues in the Guardian that the selections reveal an “appropriate” absence of “theme or consistency.” She writes:

These writers don’t group very easily into “schools.” There isn’t really an American literature at the moment, but rather American literatures. Most novelists are not explicitly reaching for “American” themes. Though the power and the strife of the country might be at the forefront of their minds, especially now, especially after November, I would be surprised if any novelist on this list thought of themselves as having articulated something about that big fractious concept known as “America.” The ambitions of writers now follow narrower channels, for both good and bad.

Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists 3 will be published internationally on May 4, according to The Bookseller. The print version can be ordered online at Amazon, or read online with a digital subscription to Granta. You can read Sigrid Rausing’s introduction to the issue here.          

Photo Credit: Granta