Meeting of young writers who write for children newspaper Yamde liy.

Chapeau! to the Parisians among the newly announced New Yorker 20. Chris Adrian, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole Krauss, Yiyun Li, and Wells Tower—we salute you!

Further chapeaux to our colleagues at The New Yorker for assembling the thing. We can hardly imagine a more thankless task. Here on White Street each of us can name writers we think should be on there, and aren’t, and others who leave us scratching our heads. (And yet, weirdly, no two of us name the same people.) Multiply that by a million subscribers, or whatever no-doubt-large fraction reads the stories … that’s a lot of Monday-evening quarterbacks.

Even on a normal week, it’s got to be tough finding stories that could conceivably interest a million different readers. In this case, there’s no falling back on household names, since with the exception of Mr. Foer, our micro generation hasn’t produced one. For reasons that may have something to do with writing programs, or Microsoft Word, or Grand Theft Auto, or just three generations of TV, we thirty-something Americans tend to languish in a protracted adolescence on the fiction-producing front. The pool of really bankable youngsters gets smaller with each passing decade, even as book and magazine publishers get more and more desperate for a bona-fide literary star. (No wonder Team Eustace has drafted a ringer from north of the border. Congratulations, Bezmozgis! The flag pin’s in the mail!)

Most of the New Yorker 20 are at work on their second or third book. It is, as David Remnick told The New York Times, “a group of promise.” May their greatest achievements lie before them, may the Muses light their way, and may the winds of fortune remain at their backs!