Navigate to News section

All The Jewish Young Literary Men (and Women)

Who will make The New Yorker’s under-40 cut?

by
Marc Tracy
May 12, 2010
Novelist Rivka Galchen.(The Washington Post)
Novelist Rivka Galchen.(The Washington Post)

The New Yorker will soon publish a list of 20 novelists under the age of 40 that are worth watching (or, rather, reading), reported the New York Observer. This got us wondering: Which prominent young Jewish novelists will make this list? Yes, this is how our magazine-mind works.

First, here’s who won’t. Jonathans Ames, Lethem, and Rosen (the last is also Nextbook Press’s editor) miss the age-related cut. So does Sam Lipsyte, author of the new The AskNew Yorker editor David Remnick said he was especially dismayed to learn that Lipsyte is 41. Finally, young Jewish novelists Nathan Englander and Allegra Goodman will presumably not appear, because they were on the equivalent list that the New Yorker came up with in 1999.

Below the jump, the 15 young Jewish novelists most likely to appear in the June 7 June 14 & 21 New Yorker. They won’t all make it, but at least three or four will.

Naomi Alderman
Shalom Auslander*
Joshua Cohen
Jonathan Safran Foer
Rivka Galchen
Keith Gessen
Jen Gilmore*
Myla Goldberg
Dara Horn
Sana Krasikov
Nicole Krauss
Lucinda Rosenfeld
Gary Shteyngart
Dalia Sofer
Adam Thirlwell

*Born 1970, and we can’t find their birthdays! They may be just barely ineligible.

What’s that? You want the five most likely? Foer, Galchen, Krasikov, Krauss, Shteyngart. (But none of them are quite the shoo-in Wells Tower is.)

Tablet Magazine has featured several of these bright young things:

• Auslander is a Tablet Magazine columnist.

• So is Cohen.

• Dara Horn wrote about Civil War re-enactments and Pesach.

• Dalia Sofer sat for a Vox Tablet podcast.

• So did Keith Gessen.

• And so did Alderman.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.