NYPL's Top Authors Under 35: 15 Years of Young Lions Fiction

For fifteen years, the Young Lions Fiction Award has recognized outstanding novels and short story collections written by authors under the age of thirty-five. Established by Rick Moody, Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and Hannah McFarland, the $10,000 prize aims to make a difference in the lives of emerging writers. Previous winners have gone on to become bestselling authors, finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and winners of MacArthur Genius Grants. As we await the decision for this year's Young Lions Fiction Award, we're returning to some of our favorite books by the Young Lions Award Winners and recommending more titles from these incredible authors.

Young Lions 2010
Young Lions 2010

2001 Winner: Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Critical Reception: "It is not often that a reviewer devours a 700-page novel at one sitting; but I did, recklessly ignoring slimmer volumes that had more urgent claims upon my attention." - Steven Poole, The Guardian
If you liked House of Leaves, read Danielewski's Only Revolutions.

2002 Winner: Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days
Critical Reception: "Colson Whitehead’s 'John Henry Days,' the follow-up to his much — and quite rightly — acclaimed 1999 debut, 'The Intuitionist,' is, by every standard, a big book. For one, there’s Whitehead’s hulking talent, the potential of which buzzed through 'The Intuitionist' with the voltage of a city power line; for another, there’s the novel’s outsize subject matter, which is more or less America, the epic idea of which Whitehead chases with the dogged ambition of a Lawrence or DeLillo." - Jonathan Miles, Salon
If you liked John Henry Days, read Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt.

2003 Winners: Tie -  Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector and Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
The Shell Collector Critical Reception: "Stunning. Eight stunning exercises in steel-tipped feathery fineness that no writer can read without envying… His is the all-knowing, all-seeing eye we find in D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Pynchon, DeLillo, Richard Powers—writers able to pin down every butterfly wing and fleck of matter in the universe, yet willing to float the unanswerables about the ‘hot, hard kernel of human experience." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you liked The Shell Collector, read Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See.
Everything is Illuminated Critical Reception: "This young author is sophisticated enough to know that all great loves, and literatures, are informed by a deep consciousness of loss: Not for nothing does his powerful novel end with a sequence of words that, even as it asserts one tormented man's desire to die, uses one final reduplication, one final echo, to forge an amazing and tremendously moving unity of past and present, fiction and history, life and death. To say any more would be to reveal too much, too clumsily, about a book that illuminates so much with such odd and original beauty." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine
If you liked Everything is Illuminated, read Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

2004 Winner: Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Critical Reception: "For her deliciously written debut novel, Truong cooks up a bitter, complex tale of heartbreak and despair. Inspired by a few lines of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Truong steps into Gertrude Stein’s Parisian kitchen to tell the tale of a man named Bonh, an exiled Vietnamese chef who catered to Stein and longtime companion Toklas in the early 1930s. What makes this narrative so addictive is not just the peek into Stein’s imagined private life and the delectable meals (the description of caramelized pineapples is particularly mouthwatering), but the emotional account of Bonh’s tragic past, including the abandonment of his beloved mother and a star-crossed love affair with Ho Chi Minh. Both eloquent and original, Salt is a savory read." - Karyn L. Barr, Entertainment Weekly
If you liked The Book of Salt, read Truong's Bitter in the Mouth.

2005 Winner: Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Critical Reception: "A fable of surpassing gravity and beauty, The Confessions of Max Tivoli returns Andrew Sean Greer to the central concerns of his first novel: how time ravages love, and how love takes its revenge  . . . [Greer] has an eerie maturity not often found in young novelists. His prose, incantatory but not overheated, idles along with a top-hatted, almost courtly elegance."—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
If you liked The Confessions of Max Tivoli, read Greer's The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

2006 Winner: Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation
Critical Reception: "The acute characterization, the adroit mixture of color and restraint, and the horrific emotional force of the narrative are impressive. Still more impressive is Iweala's ability to maintain not only our sympathy but our affection for his central character. How can Agu be as touching on the final page as he is on the first? It's something that couldn't happen easily in real life: we will overlook certain things, but massacres? Only in art can so much be demanded - and given. Iweala shows Agu acting out the worst atrocities imaginable, but still we rush to forgive him." - Simon Baker, New York Times
If you liked Beasts of No Nation, read Iweala's Our Kind of People.

2007 Winner: Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Critical Reception: "Olga Grushin's extraordinary first novel is so wise and mature that it is tempting to suspect the author's biography is a joke. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written -- the work, one would think, of someone who has been writing and publishing fiction for years, not someone who is doing it for the first time, and doing it in what is not her native language. But no, Grushin is the real thing. " - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
If you liked The Dream Life of Sukhanov, read Grushin's The Line.

YLFA Winners

2008 Winner: Ron Currie, Jr., God Is Dead
Critical Reception: "Satire is Currie's chosen mode, and the sadness is laced with wacky invention. God Is Dead is a heady cocktail of ideas. Broad-stroke symbolism and delicately shaded realism are swished together with admirable aplomb. Currie's skills are equal to just about any technical challenge, whether it be the Hitchcockian slow burn of 'My Brother, The Murderer' or a post-apocalyptic suicide orgy in 'Indian Summer.' Satirists often do a feeble job on character: Currie is determined to avoid that weakness. Indeed, the protagonist of 'The Bridge,' Dani, is such a vivid, tenderly crafted creation that we keep wishing she'll turn up again in one of the later chapters, which she never does." - Michael Faber, The Guardian
If you liked God is Dead, read Currie Jr.'s Everything Matters!

2009 Winner: Salvatore Scibona, The End
Critical Reception: "The End is stitched with care, ambition and finesse. It skips around the first half of the 20th century like a boxer, nimbly moving from an America embroiled in the beginnings of the Cold War back to the post-Great War migrations from Europe, pausing at various points in between." - Stuart Evers, The Telegraph
If you liked The End, read Scibona's short fiction in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.

2010 Winner: Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Critical Reception: "It sometimes feels as if there's nothing Tower can't render in arresting fashion. Near the end of 'Retreat,' a hunter who has killed a moose and cut out the short ribs and tenderloin characterizes the latter as 'a tapered log of flesh that looked like a peeled boa constrictor.' Tower's prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they wouldn't have arrived at on their own." - Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times
If you liked Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, read Tower's nonfiction in GQ.

2011 Winner: Adam Levin, The Instructions
Critical Reception: "This is a life-consuming novel, one that demands to be read feverishly. When it is over, other fiction feels insufficient, the newspaper seems irrelevant.… If the ultimate message of modernism was unremitting pessimism… The Instructions has given the literary genre its long deferred conclusion: Indeed, a day—or four—can serve as a reminder that death looms large for anything living, but there is lot of life to be lived in the interim." —Michael H. Miller, New York Observer
If you liked The Instructions, read Levin's Hot Pink.

2012 Winner: Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Critical Reception: "'Swamplandia!' is an astonishingly assured first novel with many rewards for its readers. Most important is its portrait of people struggling with the uncooperative world. Others include its clever yoking of literary tradition, its description of parts of Florida’s history not widely known outside the state and its fine evocation of the state’s swamps and waters." - Claire Hopley, Washington Times
If you liked Swamplandia!, read Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

2013 Winner: Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn
Critical Reception: "The plots of each story are inventive and irresistible. An Italian tourist waiting for news of a friend who went missing on a hike becomes a constant patron of a brothel. Two young girls act of age and get more than they bargained for when they leave their podunk hometown behind for a night on the Strip. Two brothers methodically pan for gold as one befriends Chinese immigrants and the other goes mad with greed. Most of the stories are soaked in a boozy haze, frenetically compelling, and somehow chockfull of memorable characters and scenes that linger for just the right amount of time." - Kevin McFarland, A.V. Club
If you liked Battleborn, read an interview with the author in The New Yorker.

2014 Winner: Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters
Critical Reception: "On the second page of his debut novel Snow Hunters, Paul Yoon vividly depicts the last moments before his protagonist Yohan is liberated from a prisoner of war camp on the Korean peninsula, 'where there was always a wind that carried the smell of soil and sickness' from the animals at a nearby farm. Yohan is about to catch a boat to Brazil and start a new life as a Japanese tailor's apprentice – and as he rides away in a UN truck, he 'shut his eyes and dreamed of castles.' This power of this image is in its simplicity, and as the rest of the book unfolds, that minimalism becomes the story's driving, masterful force. Every word is purposeful, and there is an air of meditation in Yoon's modest sentences. While the first draft was over five hundred pages, the final is a mere 208: it's evident that only the best, most important, prose remained." - Alana Levinson, NPR
If you liked Snow Hunters, read Yoon's Once the Shore.

2015 Finalists:

Our 2015 YLFA Winner will be announced at the Young Lions Fiction Award Benefit on April 27, 2015. More information at nypl.org/ylfab.