Dzanc Books has curated an alternative "20 Writers To Watch" list in response to The New Yorker recent version. While everybody has an opinion about The New Yorker's coronation chronicle, Dzanc had an interesting strategy:
While it is not the intent of our response to disparage the writers chosen, it is important to point out the flaws of any list which purports to represent an entire body of achievement while having excluded from the very voting process the majority of individuals who work daily with the material under review. As we - the independent publishers, agents, bloggers and reviewers, in total a majority of people working in literary fiction today - were not consulted by The New Yorker in the composition of their list, we feel it is essential to respond to The New Yorker's list with a complementary list of our own, offering another twenty writers worth watching, this time drawn not from a singularly New York view of publishing but from the wider world of the American independent presses.
The we referenced here is made up of nearly 100 independent publishers, agents, editors, bloggers and reviewers. As the staff of The New Yorker went to the sources they knew best when creating their list, and most of the authors they reviewed have either been published in The New Yorker or with major New York publishing houses, so we focused on writers publishing with independent houses. We realize that our list reflects its own prejudices, those coming from a different set of sources than those of The New Yorker, but we did attempt to open our list to a far greater body of voters. ... The writers included here were selected purely on the basis of this voting process, without editorial interference.
Let me be honest: I'm one of the folks who voted in the two rounds that built this list, and I'm pleased to see many of my favorites featured in the final roll-call. That, and the list of nominees, makes for an impossibly good reading list. Check them all out here.
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