Five Brooklyn Writers For Whom You Should Look Out in 2011 and Beyond!
Rachel Aviv:
Aviv, the winner of a Rona Jaffe award this year, has published reportage and criticism bravely exploring issues of faith and consciousness—a recent Harper's piece, about the early, self-aware stages of mental illness, is a preview of the book she's working on, in which she'll follow young adults at a Maine psychiatric clinic.
Catherine Chung:
Chung, trained as a mathematician, was anointed one of Granta's "New Voices" this spring, and has just sold her debut novel, Forgotten Country, to Riverhead Books. In the meantime, you can stalk her writing in birdsong and her corporeal presence in Park Slope.
Chad Harbach:
The Art of Fielding,the n+1 executive editor's first novel, will concern the youthful crises of various members of a Wisconsin liberal-arts college's baseball team; the book sold at auction this spring for $650,000—an astounding sum made more astounding when you consider that Harbach left money on the table to work with Little, Brown's Michael Pietsch, the editor of Infinite Jest. (How is there more than $650,000 on the table for a book about the Ripon baseball team?)
Brett Fletcher Lauer:
Ships That Pass, a tumblr collecting "fake", imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist" and their responses, is one of the more ingenious, suggestive uses of the internet we've ever encountered; its co-creator also edits the journal A Public Space's consistently excellent poetry section, and has poems forthcoming in jubilat and the Iowa Review.
Justin Taylor:
The coeditor of the genius hipster coffee-table tome The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide and the author of story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever has his first novel coming out in February. The Gospel of Anarchy concerns a group of anarchists living in Norhern Florida just before the turn of the millennium [who] attempt to forge a new religion based on the teachings of a hobo who used to live in their backyard.
