20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker

In 2010, the editors of the New Yorker magazine selected twenty authors under forty years of age recently featured in its publication that they thought would emerge as writers influencing the next decade. Reading this book in 2022, I see that only a handful of authors included who have indeed emerged as forces to be reckoned with. These include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Tea Obreht, and Gary Shtyngart.

The list is restricted to authors based in North America, but a good many of them are children of immigrants who landed on our shores over the course of the twentieth century. Their input adds an international spice that culturally broadens the scope of this compilation. For the most part, the chosen show more works are indeed worthy of inclusion. Even if many of the featured writers fell short of dominating today’s literary landscape, their stories still are first class. show less

I don't think that there is a single bad story in this collection. Usually, there is one or two of uneven quality, but these are all stellar. What amazed me most was the variety of topics and voices, from very modern to fairy tales to historical pieces and from very descriptive to poetic and short, streamlined sentences. I was never bored, discovered a series of authors of whom I will no doubt read more books and always looked forward to the next story. These compilations always come with a bag of criticisms (in this case, why choose age as a factor?), but regardless, Treisman did a terrific job of choosing compelling tales from a wide and fascinating corpus. I definitely recommend it!

I mostly liked the stories collected here, which were widely varied, even the ones I didn't really understand. The strength of literary fiction is the exploration of the inner life of a character and the best of these pull some pretty nifty tricks shining a light on a creature of the imagination in a nearly miraculous way. The plots often are asked to play a secondary role.

This is one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read and I discovered some new authors. The downside, of course, is that my new favorite authors are young and haven't written very many books yet. ::sigh::

I've had this volume on my shelf for a few years, and I decided to pick it up this month. Between grading and Christmas preparations, I don't have a lot of time to read in December, so short stories seemed like a good idea. This collection has some of my favorite authors, including Nicole Krauss, Dinaw Mengestu, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, along with some new-to-me authors. I generally enjoyed these stories. "The Science of Flight" by Yiyun Li and "Second Lives' by Daniel Alarcon stood out to me because of their ability to capture the essences of their character's lives in a few pages. These stories added layers upon layers to their characters through carefully crafted sentences meted out steadily across the story's pages.

This is a great collection of stories by a diverse group of young authors. Although not all of the stories were ones that I would have chosen to read, I did discover some excellent authors that I would not have otherwise learned about or considered.