New Yorker unveils '20 under 40' young writers list

 

New Yorker editor David Remnick said the list was “meant to shine a light on writers and get people to pay attention". Photograph: Harry Bliss/AP

 

Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes made a list of the best young British novelists in 1983; David Foster Wallace, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jeffrey Eugenides were named among the best American writers under 40 in 1999. Now the New Yorker has selected the 20 young writers it believes we'll be reading in years to come, with Jonathan Safran Foer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Joshua Ferris and Wells Tower all making the cut.

The eminent American literary magazine will publish the '20 under 40' fiction writers it believes are worth watching in its Monday issue. Ranging from the 24-year-old Téa Obreht, whose debut novel will be published next year, to the 39-year-old writer Chris Adrian, the list is an eclectic mix of famous and lesser-known names, neatly dividing between the genders and providing readers with a guide to potential future literary stars.

The list, compiled by the magazine's fiction team, is restricted to writers who are from or based in north America.

"I was a boy when my family left the Soviet Union," said the award-winning Canadian author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis, 37. "We came to Canada with nothing and my parents had never heard about the New Yorker or most anything else. It seems strange and remarkable to me that 30 years later I would find myself on such a list.

"But then, it seems that a number of writers on this list are from somewhere else. So I suppose it means that the trend in American life is being reflected in new American writing."

New Yorker editor David Remnick said the list was "meant to shine a light on writers and get people to pay attention". "What matters is that someone pays attention to a writer they might not have known, and that they read – that's all I want."

36-year-old Philipp Meyer, whose debut novel American Rust was published last year, said it was "enormously validating" to be chosen by the New Yorker – though he admitted that such an exercise "seems very useful when you're the one picked, but if you are not picked, you need to ignore it completely."

Some acclaimed American writers just missed out by dint of age; Dave Eggers is 40, Aleksandar Hemon 45, Colson Whitehead 40.

"It's disappointing they didn't manage to find a space for Dave Eggers but I suppose that's their rules," said the Booker-shortlisted British author Philip Hensher, who was picked as one of Granta's best young British novelists in 2003, at the age of 37. Although he admitted that it made his publishing career "a bit easier overseas", he did feel that "these age-related things are a bit artificial".
The New Yorker list might include 10 women, but Hensher said that in general such line-ups can be "rather unfair to women novelists".

"There's a well-known phenomenon of the woman novelist who puts off her career, maybe to have children," said Hensher, "so she doesn't really make an impact until after she's 40 … a good example is Penelope Fitzgerald, who only emerged about five years before the first Granta list, and of course she was 60."
He suggested it might make more sense to select the authors "who have just emerged in the last five years", rather than basing it on age. "Novel writing isn't necessarily something that young people are very good at," he said. "I was 29 when I published my first novel, but I wish I'd waited."

Ben Okri, who won the Booker prize aged 32 for The Famished Road, said he felt lists like the New Yorker's could be "pretty dangerous".

"They're very helpful for writers and they are encouraging, and can identify future talents, but on the other hand sometimes they're too soon," said the author at the Guardian Hay festival.
"We will see in 10 years' time [how these authors have fared]. What matters is not the list but that mystical quality called genius – and a bit of luck."

Beijing-born Yiyun Li, who like two other authors on the list – Jonathan Safran Foer and Dinaw Mengestu – won the Guardian First Book Award, praised the New Yorker for including a host of short story writers in its line-up. "[That] means a lot to me, as I love stories, and it is always encouraging that The New Yorker treats stories and story writers seriously," she said.

The top 20

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
Dinaw Mengestu, 31
Philipp Meyer, 36
C  E Morgan, 33
Téa Obreht, 24
Yiyun Li, 37
ZZ Packer, 37
Karen Russell, 28
Salvatore Scibona, 35
Gary Shteyngart, 37
Wells Tower, 37 

Is Bernie Madoff 'Free at Last'?

In a recent New York magazine article, writer Steve Fishman sheds light on Bernie Madoff's life behind bars. The lengthy profile reveals a string of insider details, some far more telling than accounts of Madoff's prison rumble back in October.

For starters, the disgraced financier viewed by most as a thief and criminal for swindling an estimated $65 billion in history's worst Ponzi scheme, is regarded as somewhat of a celebrity at the federal correctional complex in Butner, N.C. He has an entourage of "groupies," according to the article, and though he shuns all autograph requests, he has managed to cultivate these relationships over time. Some even go as far as dubbing him "a hero" and turn to him for advice on anything from investing to entrepreneurship.

Then there's Madoff's talent for delegating duties on to others, hiring an inmate to do his laundry for $8 a month -- negotiating a discounted rate nonetheless. On the flip side, Madoff has energetically thrown himself into the prison-work world, even though he's exempted from chores because of his age. Fishman writes:

"He proposed that he serve as the clerk in charge of budget. He had qualifications—he'd been chairman of NASDAQ. 'Hell, no,' said the supervisor to Evans, laughing. 'I do my own budget. I know what he did on the outside.'"

Instead, Madoff was assigned to maintenance and cafeteria floor-sweeping duty.

Perhaps the most startling inclusion in the article is that Madoff reportedly feels little remorse for what he has done. Instead, Fishman suggests he might even be relieved that he is no longer living a lie. The article explains:

"'It was a nightmare for me,' he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. 'I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,' he said in a little-noticed interview with them."

As for his victims...

"'F--k my victims,' he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. 'I carried them for twenty years, and now I'm doing 150 years.'"

For an in-depth view on Madoff's life in prison, read Steve Fishman's full article in New York magazine.

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Message Edited by ReneeDeFranco on 06-09-2010 10:08 AM

Unpublished Stieg Larsson manuscripts discovered

 

A young Stieg Larsson on holiday in 1987. Photograph: Per Jarl / Expo / SCANPIX/Press Association Images

Sci-fi stories The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo author wrote when he was 17 and sent to a magazine discovered in library.

The National Library of Sweden has unearthed unpublished manuscripts by a young Stieg Larsson, author of the bestselling Millennium Trilogy, which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

According to Sweden's deputy national librarian, Magdalena Gram, "they were donated to the national library in 2007 and well known by us. The manuscripts were an integrated part of an archive from the Jules Verne Magasinet, a magazine with science fiction materials."

The science fiction stories, written around 1970 when Larsson was 17 and called The Crystal Balls and The Flies, were sent to the magazine by the teenager in the hope of having them published, but were rejected. In his accompanying letter to the magazine, Larsson described himself as "a 17-year old guy from Umea with dreams of becoming an author and journalist". Larsson did go on to become a founding editor of the magazine Expo, and then a hugely popular author, but did not live to see all his dreams become reality.
Larsson died suddenly at the age of 50 in 2004, just a few months after selling the first book in the Millennium series and leaving completed manuscripts of the two subsequent books. There are also believed to be 200 pages of a sequel to the trilogy stored on the late author's laptop.

Given the global success of the trilogy – the books have sold 22m copies in 42 countries and a Hollywood adaptation is under way – there is likely to be massive interest in any unpublished material, despite its age.
However, the discovery is also likely to intensify the bitter dispute around Larsson's estate. When the author died intestate, his partner of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, lost all rights to his estate to Larsson's father and brother. In 2005, she refused an offer by the family to hand over Larsson's computer in exchange for the half of the flat she had shared with him. There is speculation that outlines for six further novels are also contained in the laptop.

Gram could not say if the stories would ever be read by a wider audience. "A national library is not a publisher. The rights to the texts are owned by Stieg Larsson's father and his brother," she said, and confirmed that the library was in contact with Larsson's heirs.

While fans devour posthumously discovered and published work, its publication does not always enhance a writer's reputation. Philip Larkin's Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, two novels of lesbian intrigue set at a girls' boarding school, published after his death in 1985, led many to agree wholeheartedly with Larkin's own note that they were "unforgettably bad". Last year saw the publication of Vladimir Nabokov's uncompleted final novel, The Original of Laura, that he had requested be destroyed upon his death. Again the critical response was overwhelmingly negative.
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Michelle Pauli
The Guardian
Wednesday 9 June 2010

The Book You Have to Read: “Caleb Williams,” by William Godwin

If today’s readers and writers of crime fiction look over their shoulders, who are lurking in the shadows behind Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins? Edgar Allan Poe, of course, and Charles Dickens. As it happens, those two authors met once, in Philadelphia in March 1842, and by a quirk of fate we know one of the subjects they talked about--a third writer, William Godwin, who had died six years before.

It’s an odd, maybe significant coincidence. Godwin is best known today for his novel Caleb Williams, which stands in the shadows behind the shadows--it’s a book that invisibly underpins the genre, The Rap Sheet, and much else. You can even argue that, with Caleb Williams, Godwin invented crime fiction, and that he was the first noir author.

Noir? It’s a big claim, but it holds up.

A cozy crime story takes place in an ideal world where the detective restores perfection by rooting out the murderer who has briefly imposed a blemish on it.

Noir, on the other hand, has the opposite dynamic. It’s set in a fundamentally corrupt world that’s wall-to-wall blemishes, a place where the investigator, for all his flaws, is the best thing available to a morally upright individual. A noir hero can never make the world a wonderful place. Faced with a crime, he can only do his best, according to his lights, and hope he’ll maybe survive until next time. It’s a job description for Caleb Williams.

William Godwin was remarkable by any standards. He was an English anarchist at the time of the French Revolution (which he naturally supported). His first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a seminal feminist text. His daughter Mary married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein (1818). His stepdaughter had an illegitimate child with Lord Byron. Godwin wrote novels partly to make money and partly as vehicles for his philosophical beliefs.

He published Caleb Williams in 1794, five years after the Revolution. It’s not a whodunit, and it’s only a mystery for the first third of the story. But it centers on a crime and murder in Britain, and on the methods and consequences of investigating that murder. It’s a novel of considerable and often uncomfortable psychological penetration. And it’s full of incredibly vivid and realistic snapshots of the world in which its author lived. It’s one of the prototypes of the crime novel not only in the way it concerns a murder but also--as Poe himself noted--in the way it was constructed, from effects back to causes.

The rest of this piece describes the bones of the story. But the bare summary won’t spoil your enjoyment if you read the novel afterwards. It’s the body of this book that counts, not the bones that support it.

Caleb Williams is poor but intelligent. Orphaned at 18, he’s given a job as a secretary by the local squire, Ferdinando Falkland, a man of great refinement who is drawn into a feud with a boorish neighbor. When that neighbor is murdered, Falkland is the chief suspect--but he’s so gentlemanly that his fellow magistrates can’t believe he could commit a sneaky little slaying. Two local farmers are hanged instead.

In the second part of the book, Caleb investigates the murder and, with growing horror, realizes that Falkland not only killed the neighbor but let two innocent men hang for his crime. For many authors, the revelation of the real murderer would be the climax. In fact we’re not even halfway through, and the real climax is yet to come.

At this point, the narrative switches: until now, Caleb has pursued Falkland; but now it’s the other way round. Falkland treats his hapless secretary with increasing hostility: it’s almost as if he transfers the hatred he feels for himself to Caleb, the man who won’t let him forget what he has done.

Caleb’s attempt to expose his master backfires, and he’s flung into jail without trial. His experiences as a prisoner are described in harsh, documentary detail. At last Caleb escapes. But he’s friendless and penniless. The resources of the state and of society are in league against him. And the worst is still on the horizon.

In the last part of Godwin’s novel, Caleb is on the run. Falkland mobilizes the full weight of government authority to hunt down the entirely innocent secretary--and everyone else joins in. There are even broadsheets and ballads that portray him as a master criminal.

Caleb falls in with a gang of thieves living wild in a ruined forest mansion presided over by the landlady from hell. It’s interesting how Godwin describes these dangerous criminals--some are also victims, and deserve a bit of sympathy despite their crimes; but others are essentially corrupt, a sort of lawless mirror image of the sinister authority figures who control the country for their own benefit.

With the world against him, Caleb ranges across England, taking a variety of disguises. He becomes a beggar, a farmer’s son, a watchmaker, and a math teacher, an Orthodox Jew--and he even ekes out a living as a hack writer on Grub Street, which will strike a grimly familiar chord for many of The Rap Sheet’s contributors.

Despite his ingenuity, his perseverance and his abilities, Caleb can never escape the past: sooner or later Falkland or his avenging agents catch up with him. The great irony here is that Caleb, who has investigated and solved a crime, finds that no one will believe him: on the contrary, he’s treated as the criminal.

Finally, Caleb’s story reaches its end. In fact two of them, neither of which is exactly cheery. One of the endings is the standard, published version; but an earlier, gloomier variant was published in the 1960s, and is included in the excellent Penguin edition of this novel.

Neither conclusion makes for easy reading. Caleb is a flawed hero, just as Falkland is a flawed villain. Everyone is guilty. In the end, everyone has to pay for his sins.

William Godwin created a monster he did not entirely understand: Caleb Williams grew in ways he neither planned nor expected, and the result is too powerful, too quirky, to fit neatly inside the philosophical envelope he planned for it.

In other words, Godwin set out to write a philosophical tract and ended up inventing Noir.

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The Rap Sheet, Friday June 4, 2010