Literary Lion Cubs: 20 under 40

The New Yorker has announced its once in a decade list of the best twenty up and coming fiction writers under forty years of age:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, The Thing Around Your Neck)
• Chris Adrian (The Children's Hospital, A Better Angel)
• Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio, War by Candlelight)
• David Bezmozgis (Natasha)
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Madeleine Is Sleeping)
• Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed, Then We Came to the End)
• Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animal)
• Nell Freudenberger (The Dissident, Lucky Girls)
• Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances)
• Nicole Krauss (The History of Love, Man Walks into a Room, the upcoming Great House)
• Yiyun Li (The Vagrants, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the upcoming Gold Bold, Emerald Girl: Stories)
• Dinaw Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,Children of the Revolution, the upcoming How to Read the Air)
• Philipp Meyer (American Rust)
• C.E. Morgan (All the Living)
• Tea Obreht (The Tiger's Wife, coming in March 2011)
• Z.Z. Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere)
• Karen Russell (St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves)
• Salvatore Scibona (The End)
• Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, the upcoming Super Sad True Love Story)
• Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned) 

There is a prerequisite for this list: considered authors must have been able to submit unpublished material to the New Yorker. So I'm guessing many deserving young talent missed out. I've also seen most of these names in the by lines of New Yorker fiction, columns or articles in the past. Only two of the list's authors, Ms Obrecht and Ms Russell, are in their twenties. Some notables on previous lists are Junot Diaz (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri (1999), and David Foster Wallace. The list will appear in next week's double fiction issue of the  NYer.