For the fifth year, the National Book Foundation has named its Five Under Thirty-Five honorees, a group of young novelists and short fiction writers selected for recognition by former National Book Award (NBA) winners and finalists. This year's list, dominated by women, includes expats from the former Yugoslavia and the Virgin Islands, two recipients of the Rona Jaffe Writers' Award for emerging women writers, an O. Henry Prize winner, and two small press authors.
Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna and Rona Jaffe Writers' Award–winner Sarah Braunstein was selected by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, an NBA fiction finalist for Madeleine Is Sleeping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004). Braunstein's debut novel, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, is forthcoming from Norton in 2011.
Grace Krilanovich, whose first novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, was published by Two Dollar Radio in September, was chosen by Scott Spencer, an NBA fiction finalist for his novels A Ship Made of Paper (Ecco, 2003) and Endless Love (Knopf, 1979).
Téa Obreht, a New York State author (by way of the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, and Egypt) who has already seen her fiction published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, was chosen by Colum McCann, last year's NBA winner for Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009). Obreht's first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, is forthcoming from Random House in 2011.
Rona Jaffe Writers' Award–winner and Drew University professor Tiphanie Yanique, born in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, was selected by Jayne Anne Phillips, a finalist for Lark and Termite (Knopf, 2009). Yanique's debut novella and story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, was published by Graywolf Press last March.
O. Henry Prize–winner Paul Yoon was selected by Kate Walbert, an NBA finalist for Our Kind, a novel in stories (Scribner, 2004). Yoon's first story collection, Once the Shore, published by Sarabande in 2009, won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares.
The five will read from their books at a party at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, New York, on November 15. The event, hosted by Rosanne Cash and featuring Love Is a Mix Tape author Rob Sheffield as deejay, commences the National Book Awards Week celebrations leading up to the announcement of this year's prizes on November 17.
The video below is the book trailer for Krilanovich's debut, which follows a band of "vampire junkies" through a nineties-era Pacific Northwest.
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