Politics & Prose 20 Under 40

When our staff read the "20 under 40" list published by The New Yorker a few weeks ago, we were thrilled with many of the writers included but also intrigued that some of our staff favorites did not make the cut. Of course, all lists are somewhat arbitrary and all must have a quantitative cut-off point. There's no room for an infinite number of winners at the Olympics. Still, one or more of us felt passionate enough about certain writers under the age of 40 that we decided to compile our own list of the best with a few reasons why, in our opinion, they deserve notice.

Click the titles for more information about these books.

-- Kevin Brockmeier (37)

Kevin Brockmeier's books articulate vivid and imaginative expressions of love, loss, and the intricacies of human relationships. In The Brief History of the Dead, this takes place in an apocalyptic age and a curiously unique afterlife. His short story collections Things That Fall From the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer demonstrate a similar clear-sighted and meditative perspective, blurring the edge between fantasy and dramatic fiction.

The Brief History of the Dead (Paperback)

By Kevin Brockmeier
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9781400095957
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Published: Vintage, 1/2007
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The View From the Seventh Layer (Paperback)

By Kevin Brockmeier
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780307387769
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Published: Vintage, 3/2009
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Things that Fall from the Sky (Paperback)

By Kevin Brockmeier
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9780375727696
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Published: Vintage, 7/2003
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--Rana Dasgupta (39)
Rana Dasgupta tackles modern life with storytelling akin to fairy tale or fable, but set in contemporary settings. His fiction explores globalization through his talent for vivid, at times soaring, language and his surrealist slant on modernity. Dasgupta's forthcoming novel, SOLO, explores the life of a 100 year old Bulgarian man who imagines what his own life could have been, and what the world's future will be.

Solo (Hardcover)

By Rana Dasgupta
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9780547397085
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Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2/2011
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Tokyo Cancelled (Paperback)

By Rana DasGupta
$13.00
ISBN-13: 9780802170095
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Published: Grove Press, 3/2005
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-- Nathan Englander (39) brings a high energy level and evocative prose to his fiction writing. He is not afraid to broach difficult topics with his powerfully combustible mix of the earthy and the spiritual, with his dark humor and yet compassionate and human tenderness for his characters, who often find themselves in morally complex circumstances.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (Paperback)

By Nathan Englander
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780375704437
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Published: Vintage, 3/2000
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The Ministry of Special Cases (Paperback)

By Nathan Englander
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780375704444
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Published: Vintage, 4/2008
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--Olga Grushin (39)
Olga Grushin's gently reflective and impressionistic style is evocative of the intangible moods and complex emotions of a society on the transitional cusp of the Soviet era and the post-Perestroika uncertainties in contemporary Russia. In THE LINE, she created a composite from three distinct periods of hesitant hope in Soviet history. In THE DREAM LIFE OF SUKHANOV, she addressed a bureaucrat's introspection and uncertainty as he faces the repercussions of his life choices as seen against the background of the changes in contemporary urban Russia.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Paperback)

By Olga Grushin
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780143038405
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Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2/2007
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The Line (Hardcover)

By Olga Grushin
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780399156168
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Published: A Marian Wood Book/Putnam, 4/2010
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--Dara Horn (33)
Dara Horn's novels perfectly blend elements of history, suspense, romance, and Jewish history into fascinating and dramatic tales. Her novels - ALL OTHER NIGHTS about Jewish spies during the Civil War and THE WORLD TO COME about a Yiddish author and a stolen Chagall painting - are staff favorites.

All Other Nights (Paperback)

By Dara Horn
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780393338324
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 3/2010
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The World to Come (Paperback)

By Dara Horn
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9780393329063
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 10/2006
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--Uzodinma Iweala (28)
Iweala's lucid debut novel, BEASTS OF NO NATION, draws the reader into the world of Agu, a child soldier. Despite the brutality and torment Agu endures and creates, we never lose sight of his humanity nor of the inextinguishable spark of hope that seems to live inside of every child.

Beasts of No Nation (Paperback)

By Uzodinma Iweala
$11.99
ISBN-13: 9780060798680
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Published: Harper Perennial, 8/2006
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--Miranda July (36)
Miranda July is an artist, screenwriter, and an amazing short story writer who is incredibly in touch with the intimate details that make a life. Her collection of short stories, NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU, provides an analysis of love, youth, and heartbreak that is strange, utterly unique, and right on point. She is one of the most exciting young writers to hit the literary scene in the past decade.

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories (Paperback)

By Miranda July
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780743299411
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Published: Scribner, 5/2008
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--Reif Larsen (29)
Reif Larsen's first novel, THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET, is an energetic and bizarre coming-of-age adventure set on the rails. Larsen's stunning details and able handling of his precocious narrator reveal his talents as a young writer.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Paperback)

By Reif Larsen
$16.00
ISBN-13: 9780143117353
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Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 4/2010
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--Jeff Lemire (34)
The quality of Jeff Lemire's sketchy black and white art is a perfect companion to his often subtle, character based, stories. Weaving Canadian history, hockey, comic books, and tragedy, Lemire's THE ESSEX COUNTY TRILOGY (Tales from the Farm, Ghost Stories, and The Country Nurse) is one of the recent high points in graphic storytelling.

The Complete Essex County (Paperback)

By Jeff Lemire
$29.95
ISBN-13: 9781603090384
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Published: Top Shelf Productions, 8/2009
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Tales from the Farm (Paperback)

By Jeff Lemire
$9.95
ISBN-13: 9781891830884
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Top Shelf Productions, 3/2007
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Ghost Stories (Paperback)

By Jeff Lemire
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9781891830945
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Top Shelf Productions, 9/2007

The Country Nurse (Paperback)

By Jeff Lemire
$9.95
ISBN-13: 9781891830952
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Published: Top Shelf Productions, 8/2008

--Maile Meloy (38)
Despite her youth, Maile Meloy has published two novels and two story collections, the most recent of which is BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT, a quiet yet stirring collection that reverberates long after the book is back on the shelf.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Paperback)

By Maile Meloy
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781594484650
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Published: Riverhead Trade, 7/2010
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Half in Love: Stories (Paperback)

By Maile Meloy
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780743246859
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Published: Scribner, 6/2003
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Liars and Saints (Paperback)

By Maile Meloy
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780743261982
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Published: Scribner, 7/2004
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A Family Daughter (Paperback)

By Maile Meloy
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780743277679
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Published: Scribner, 2/2007
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--Joe Meno (36)
Joe Meno is an experimental author who writes emotional, lyrical stories in the vein of Jonathan Safran Foer. He is a novelist and short story writer at the forefront of a new generation of American authors.

The Boy Detective Fails (Paperback)

By Joe Meno
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9781933354101
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Published: Akashic Books, 9/2006
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--China Miéville (38)
Best known for Perdido Street Station and his dystopic futuristic imaginings, China Miéville creates elaborately conceived, philosophically complex and coherent worlds with astute commentary on our own realities. Most recently, he introduced us to the politically allegorical, police procedural The City & The City, in which two culturally divided nations - Besz and Ul Qoma - live as neighbors in a single city, yet are forbidden to acknowledge each other's existence, and to Kraken, in which the plot focuses on the investigation of a magically empowered radical cult, which worships giant squid.

Perdido Street Station (Mass Market Paperback)

By China Mieville
$7.99
ISBN-13: 9780345459404
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Published: Del Rey, 7/2003
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The City & The City (Paperback)

By China Mieville
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780345497529
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Published: Del Rey, 4/2010
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-- Maggie O'Farrell (38)
Maggie O'Farrell has an unusually striking writing style, clear and concise, blunt and at times brutal, nonetheless her sentence construction and word choices are filled with eloquence, poetry, and an unfailing reality in her character development. Almost without exception, her principle characters have experienced some loss, death, or other trauma, and she conveys this by using present tense narrative, letting her readers participate in their interior monologues and worlds, the complexity of their decisions and their troubled family life. Each of these books reveals the slow pace of time and fate changing relationships and life circumstances.

The Hand That First Held Mine (Hardcover)

By Maggie O'Farrell
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9780547330792
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Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 4/2010
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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Paperback)

By Maggie O'Farrell
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780156033671
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Published: Mariner Books, 6/2008
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--Julie Orringer (36)
Julie Orringer has only published two books so far, the sweeping, absorbing novel THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE and the captivating, multi-perspective story collection, HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER, yet both have been recommended as must-reads by our staff.

The Invisible Bridge (Hardcover)

By Julie Orringer
$26.95
ISBN-13: 9781400041169
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Published: Knopf, 5/2010
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How to Breathe Underwater (Paperback)

By Julie Orringer
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9781400034369
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Published: Vintage, 4/2005
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--Dash Shaw (27)
Dash Shaw is one of the most innovative cartoonists of his generation. Willing to experiment with form and color to tell his stories, and with an almost cartographic zeal in illustrating place and time, Shaw's books, THE BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON and BODYWORLD, grip the reader with a depth of story much needed in the medium.

The Bottomless Belly Button (Paperback)

By Dash Shaw, Gary Groth, Jacob Covey
$29.99
ISBN-13: 9781560979159
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Published: Fantagraphics Books, 6/2008

BodyWorld (Hardcover)

By Dash Shaw
$27.95
ISBN-13: 9780307378422
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Published: Pantheon, 4/2010
--Jake Silverstein (35)
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better" wrote Samuel Beckett. In the course of Nothing Happened and Then It Did, Jake Silverstein fails to hack it as a small town reporter, fails to find Ambrose Bierce's body, fails to cover a dangerous road race, fails to scoop The New Yorker (twice) and fails to win a schlock-besmeared poetry contest. His failures are narrated with a limber and ingenious prose style that is unerring at the level of the sentence. Walking the edge between palpable absurdity and wry self-possession, Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a worthy heir to the great American tradition of making it up as you go along.

Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction (Hardcover)

By Jake Silverstein
$23.95
ISBN-13: 9780393076462
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 4/2010
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--Zadie Smith (35)
As a novelist and essayist, Zadie Smith is a huge and multitudinous talent. She is at once deep in the grain of the English novel, but promiscuously at home with the furious ambition of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. Lovers of the novel Howards End will be impressed with Zadie Smith's ON BEAUTY, a novel that transposes, re-imagines and opens out from Forrester's novel with a narrative that connects race, art and love.

On Beauty (Paperback)

By Zadie Smith
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780143037743
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 9/2006
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--Adam Thirlwell (38)
The most powerful modern prose stylists - -Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, Bellow- - were busy sharpening knives for the writers they inherited from. Adam Thirlwell's filial entanglements with this quartet are a lot more playful. The author of two novels and a felicitously strange book about translation and style, Thirlwell writes with an antic intelligence about everything from hyper-verbal three-ways in Politics, history as bedroom farce in The Escape and the instructive pathos of a lost translation of Madame Bovary in The Delighted States.

Politics (Paperback)

By Adam Thirlwell
$13.99
ISBN-13: 9780007163670
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Published: Harper Perennial, 9/2004
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The Escape (Hardcover)

By Adam Thirlwell
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9780374148782
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Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3/2010
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The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, (Paperback)

By Adam Thirlwell
$20.00
ISBN-13: 9780312428297
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Published: Picador, 3/2010
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--Steve Toltz (38)
Steve Toltz is an Australian author who knows how to spin a story. His first novel, FRACTION OF A WHOLE, is a sprawling, multi-layered mystery that brings the unique setting of Australia and its surroundings into fantastic foreground.

A Fraction of the Whole (Paperback)

By Steve Toltz
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780385521734
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Published: Spiegel & Grau, 9/2008
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--Jonathan Tropper (40)
Sporting a signature knack for finding humor in the dismal, Jonathan Tropper seems capable of surveying the entire landscape of human sadness with unfalteringly incisive wit and poignancy. Dealing with a death in the family? A falling-out between life-long friends? An incurable disease? Turn to Tropper, and you'll surely be smiling again in no time or money back. A veteran among rookies on the 20 under 40 list, Tropper walks the literary line effortlessly between youthful buoyancy and seasoned gravity. Next year, he will surely join the ranks of Chabon and Eggers as one of the list's most missed.

Everything Changes (Paperback)

By Jonathan Tropper
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780385337427
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Published: Bantam, 3/2006
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Plan B (Paperback)

By Jonathan Tropper
$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780312645076
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Published: St. Martin's Griffin, 5/2010
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How to Talk to a Widower (Paperback)

By Jonathan Tropper
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780385338912
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Published: Bantam, 6/2008
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This Is Where I Leave You (Paperback)

By Jonathan Tropper
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780452296367
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Published: Plume, 6/2010
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The Book of Joe (Paperback)

By Jonathan Tropper
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780385338103
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Published: Bantam, 1/2005
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Contributions by Michael Allen, Sarah Baline, Lacey Dunham, Andrew Getman, Bill Leggett, Conor Moran, Shannon O'Neill, Sarah Owens, Sam Ramos, Elizabeth Sher, and Adam Waterreus.