The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Author: Jameson Fitzpatrick

June 8, 2010

The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue was released Monday, featuring this year’s 20 Under 40–“twenty young writers who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.” This year’s honorees are:

One member of the coveted list, Chris Adrian, is gay, and though his books are not generally gay-themed, a gay doctor (whose name is an anagram of Adrian’s) does appear in all of his books. In addition to writing, Adrian is an MD himself and has also studied at Harvard Divinity School.

Other writers on the list have also touched on LGBT themes in their work. In Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s The Ms. Hempel Chronicles, the protagonist, a middle-school English teacher, speculates that one her female students “will be gay when she grows up.” Yiyun Li’s “Son” from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the title story in Gold Boy, Emerald Green both deal with homosexuality in the context of mother-son relationships. In the title story of ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee, a lonely student at Yale is forced to confront the possibility that she is a lesbian.

Read the Q. & A. with Chris Adrian here and look for his story for the 20 Under 40 series in a future issue this summer.