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← Back to all issuesGranta 54: Best of Young American Novelists
Summer 1996
The twenty best American novelists under forty, chosen by Robert Stone, Anne Tyler, Tobias Wolff, and Ian Jack.
From this Issue
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Agnes of Iowa
Lorrie Moore
‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’
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Looking for the General
Madison Smartt Bell
‘Midday, and the sun thrummed from the height of its arc so that the lizard seemed to cast no shadow.’
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Orno and Marshall
Ethan Canin
‘Marshall was unlike anyone Orno had ever met before. He was able to converse with Mr and Mrs Pboson as though he was of their own generation.’
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Burning Mary
Tom Drury
‘Paul Emmons was a college student with no money behind him and none in front and so he seemed immune from trouble.’
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Birthday Boy
Tony Earley
‘During the night something like a miracle happened: Jim's age grew an extra digit.’
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How He Came to be Nowhere
Jonathan Franzen
‘Andy said no, he wasn't arrogant about his victory.’
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Apples
David Guterson
‘He remembered the new, fresh, orchard country of his youth and the rows of apple trees his father had planted on the east bank of the Columbia River.’
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Something Called Crab Deluxe
David Haynes
‘So on Saturday morning I arose like Venus from the sea.’
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Slips of Love
Allen Kurzweil
‘He gripped a paint roller in one hand, a bucket in the other, and was covering the month's graffiti with gray latex.’
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Farewell
Fae Myenne Ng
‘If Grandpa Leong had been a family man, there might have been real tears, a grieving wife draped in muslin, the fabric weaving around her like burned skin.’
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Maximum Security
Robert O’Connor
‘Hot and hopeful under the May sun, air crinkling above the highway. Except my Ford Escort didn't care for the heat and flatlined a few hundred yards from home.’
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Moscow, Idaho
Chris Offutt
‘Tilden stopped digging and wiped his sleeve across his forehead, leaving a brown smear on his skin.’
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A Fan Letter
Stewart O’Nan
‘Before I begin I'd like to say that I'll try to remember everything as best I can, though sometimes I know it won't be right.’
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The Driving Child
Mona Simpson
‘Staring out at the endless gray, Mary wrote a letter to her mother and told her she'd named the baby Jane, the name she'd years ago given her only doll.’
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Xmas, Jamaica Plain
Melanie Rae Thon
‘I’m the one who got away, the one you don’t know; I’m the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush.’
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Future Shock
Kate Wheeler
‘Althea's neck strained. Her black, small eyes shifted swiftly, blinked, then fixed evilly on Ingrid.’
