"Writers to Watch" in Atlanta
There’s no doubt about it, the New Yorker’s list of 20 fiction writers under 40 is definitely packed with great picks. Wells Tower, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ZZ Packer, Joshua Ferris – so many of these names deserve raves of recognition. But (like some have noted including The New Yorker’s editors themselves) their list is by no means a comprehensive introduction to young writers working today. As we expected, the list is bent heavily toward writers with preexisting connections to the magazine.
A few interesting lists have popped up as a response, including one from lit blog The Millions that followed similar guidelines to create a non-overlapping list. Their “alternate-universe” picks include Chris Bachelder, Myla Goldberg, Victor LaValle, and number of other established young guns.
Earlier this week, though, the founders of Dzanc Books, a Michigan-based small press, published a list of emerging writers that didn’t follow the same editorial process. Instead, they polled “nearly 100 independent publishers, agents, editors, bloggers and reviewers” with the intention of creating a list “drawn not from a singularly New York view of publishing but from the wider world of the American independent presses.” The result, 20 Writers to Watch, includes some names with cult-ish followings like Kelly Link and Gary Lutz along with two from Atlanta’s burgeoning literary scene, Blake Butler and Jamie Iredell.
Butler is the author of a novella, Ever, and a novel-in-stories, Scorch Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Believer Book Award. A new novel, There is No Year, is due from Harper Perennial at the beginning of next year. He’s well known as the editor of HTMLGiant: the Internet Literature Magazine Blog of the Future.
Jamie Iredell’s chapbooks were collected and published as Prose. Poems. A Novel last year. His latest, The Book of Freaks, is forthcoming from Future Tense Books this fall. He’s a recent graduate of the GSU Ph.D in Creative Writing program.
Both authors help run Solar Anus, a reading series here in Atlanta.