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A 5 Under 35 Report From 2 Under 35

Michelle and Lauren, our fabulous Publicity Assistants, attended 5 Under 35 earlier this week.  Below they tell us all about the event.

For the past few years, the National Book Foundation has kicked off National Book Awards week with “5 Under 35” —a celebration of five fresh and exciting writers under the age of 35.

This year, authors Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Franzen, Francine Prose, Mary Gaitskill and Jim Shepard—all former National Book Award Fiction Finalists—each selected a young fiction writer “who they found particularly promising.” Respectively, they chose Matthew Eck, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Nam Le, and Fiona Maazel. Each author read from their most recent book to a captive audience of friends and interested writers, editors, publishers, journalists, and bloggers at the Tribeca Cinemas bar the night of Monday, November 17.

Each previous Fiction Finalist introduced their Under 35 choice with glowing recommendations and amusing anecdotes. Joshua Ferris, in fact, joked that he had originally wanted to pick Philip Roth. “Why don’t we call it 5 Under 35 Times 2 Plus 5?” he asked. But after listing all of Roth’s awards, Ferris decided, “To hell with him. That’s enough!”

Also attending the event was musician Dean Wareham, who MC’d, and journalist/writer/pop-culture expert Chuck Klosterman—the night’s DJ extraordinaire. Chuck’s job seemed to consist of hanging out in the DJ loft (read: corner) and looking down curiously at the crowd of people squinting back up at him, his head and beard playing camouflage against the red walls and lights of the venue.

Some of the featured novels fell into category of so-called “slacker fiction”—stories of lackadaisical college years, creative oppression, and distinct antipathy towards the publishing industry, or as the literary hero of Gessin’s slacker protagonist quips: “the publishing inertia.” Author Nam Le’s piece featured a 20 something male slacker, also by the name Nam, who is seriously suffering from writer’s block in his last year of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the midst of his character’s frustration, Le deftly satirizes a literary community and industry that encourages writers to find what makes them both “stand out” and fit into the genre of the moment. “Ethnic literature’s hot” says a visiting literary agent. As Le read to a crowd akin to the antithesis of his fictional self, the paradoxical nature of the situation was only heightened by Le’s disclaimer, spoken with a facetious but equaling endearing grin: “the views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the author.”

Young writers tell us in an explicitly subterranean way: I am not a niche! But as history has shown, not wanting to be a niche seems to always become a movement in itself. What makes this select group of five stand out from the next generation of anti-establishment artists is their extraordinary ability to render the usual realities of youth—war, romance, integration, dreams of our hero’s approval—as new, visceral, and with intelligence that is neither earnest nor loquacious, but genuine and humble.


The first picture is of Michelle and Chuck Klosterman.  The second picture is of Lauren and Nam Le.

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