Once every ten years Granta publishes a list of the twenty best American fiction writers under the age of forty. In 1997 and 2007 we picked out such luminaries as Daniel Alarcon, Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole Krauss, Lorrie Moore, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Akhil Sharma and Gary Shteyngart.

This issue distils the preoccupations of another generation; a selection of writers you will be hearing more from, chosen by panel of judges who are themselves acclaimed writers: Patrick deWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus and Sigrid Rausing.