Customer Reviews

Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2 (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

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Even though the cover makes me want to vomit, the content is primo, like Primo Levi or like pot mixed with crack.

Granta's second Best of Young American Novelists is, as you would expect, a fascinating and constantly interesting collection. Taking 21 young novelists under the age of 35, this is an insightful "state of the nation" take on the mood of the creative minds of the American youth. What are they concerned with? Well, death and ageing features strongly, which is a bit of a surprise. Also notable is the rich ethnicity of the chosen writers with many born outside of the US.

It's almost invidious to pick the stand outs as much will depend on personal taste and there are few weak offerings amongst this collection. For me though, Christopher Coake is certainly a writer" that I will be actively seeking to read. I also very much enjoyed Nell Freudenberger's account of an aged aunt's view on mixed race relationships in Where East Meets West. The extract from Dara Horn's civil war novel (since published as All Other Nights: A Novel which I will certainly be seeking out) is also terrific story-telling. Maile Meloy is also a writer that I will be looking out for.

Perhaps a little surprisingly, there's not much in the way of efforts at innovative writing styles, although Jonathan Safran Foer has a unique style and Karen Russell's imagining of ex-US Presidents reincarnated in equine form is certainly "out there". The final piece by John Wray also hints at strange goings-on, but as an extract from a novel, I was left wondering what it was all about despite being drawn in to the story.

There were few stories here that didn't offer some interest or enjoyment. To my taste, Russian-born Olga Grushin `s was over-written and therefore somewhat "stodgy", and Gabe Hudson's US marine piece was not to my taste, but by and large this is a consistently interesting collection from young American writers.

The reason I bought this short story collection, the first one I've ever read, was that both Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer have stories in it and because I wanted to discover a few more talented American authors. Well, considering that 11 of the writers featured on this collection are now on my To Read list, the book did its job.

As you might expect from a short stories collection, it has its ups and downs, some pieces are lengthier than they should have been and others made me question the reason for their inclusion on the collection.
While others, such as Olga Grushin's Exile, that features prose so beautiful that can be read as poetry, the unusual The Barn at the End of Our Term by Karen Russell, in which former Americans presidents are turned into horses and the Salingeresque In the Tunnel by John Wray made the whole experience worthwhile.

3.5 out of 5