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← Back to all issuesGranta 139: Best of Young American Novelists 3
Spring 2017
Every ten years, Granta devotes an issue to new American fiction, showcasing the young novelists deemed to be the best of their generation – writers of remarkable achievement and promise, still in their twenties and thirties.
In this special issue, we bring you Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017: twenty-one outstanding writers who capture the preoccupations of modern America.
From this Issue
|Granta 139
Los Angeles
Emma Cline
‘It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays.’
|Granta 139
Uri
Joshua Cohen
‘There’s just no way, unassisted, to commit suicide. But then there’s no way to be just a human, isolated, stripped or just stripped of contexts – because even a cell must have a floor, a ceiling, walls.’
|Granta 139
Revolutions
Jen George
‘Small praise was like a drug for party members, though we used real drugs too, hard ones, drugs that imbued one with the facility for ruthless violence and multiple orgasms.’
|Granta 139
Day 4
Rachel B. Glaser
‘She sat sweating on the curb as her mother’s narrow face hovered over the parking lot like a hologram.’
|Granta 139
Yport
Lauren Groff
‘She pokes her head through the skylights and sees the tide far out, the exposed seabed sinister as the surface of the moon. Tiny people pick their way across.’
|Granta 139
Leaving Gotham City
Yaa Gyasi
‘I can’t remember the last time we said I love you before hanging up the phone. I can’t even remember the last time we said goodbye.’
|Granta 139
The Meat Suit
Garth Risk Hallberg
‘All life is suffering. At the zendo where Jolie went Thursdays after sixth period, not much in the way of portable wisdom got dispensed, but this was, near as she could tell, the through line.’
|Granta 139
Country & Eastern
Greg Jackson
‘Anyone could find courage when the World-Historical Spirit had selected you to enact your martyrdom on the Six O’Clock News. But in the shadows, in secret, unrecognized?’
|Granta 139
Remembering Westgate
Sana Krasikov
‘I wonder if the only way to grasp what is terrifying and unimaginable for those of us who haven’t experienced it is to feel around the contours of inescapability, the boundary of its negative space.’
|Granta 139
The Answers
Catherine Lacey
‘And each time I hit the tarmac I had this terrible feeling that the trip I’d just taken had never even happened, that I’d spent hundreds for a memory I could barely recall.’
|Granta 139
The Anthology
Karan Mahajan
‘Long before terrorism became fashionable in the West and commonplace in the East, there was a bombing at the Sovereign Center in Delhi.’
|Granta 139
Lipari
Anthony Marra
‘Frank Laganà stood on the cliff suited in black, as straight as an exclamation point, poised to leap to his death once again.’
|Granta 139
This Is Our Descent
Dinaw Mengestu
‘When it came to our son, her defensive instincts were well-developed and all the more necessary because it was hard from the outside to see why we were so protective.’
|Granta 139
All the Caged Things
Chinelo Okparanta
‘All that thought of home gave the girl a sickly feeling, the longing of something so out of reach, something she wasn’t even sure she could any longer truly remember.’
|Granta 139
What Terrible Thing It Was
Esmé Weijun Wang
‘Dennis with his bespectacled eyes on his phone, performing the act of emotional multitasking. While I’ve been psychotic, he’s been phone banking.’
