Once every ten years Granta publishes a list of the twenty best American fiction writers under the age of forty.

In 1997 and 2007 Granta 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 presents a distillation of another generation's preoccupations. It is an anthology of twenty fascinating writers you will be hearing more from, chosen by panel of judges who are all acclaimed writers themselves: Paul Beatty, Patrick DeWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus and Sigrid Rausing.