Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation

by Eric Liu (Editor)

Overview

Jenny Lyn Bader • Stephen Beachy • Paul Beatty • David Bernstein • David Greenberg • Paula Kamen • Ted Kleine • Karen Lehrman • • Eric Liu • Lalo Lopez • Lisa Palac • Robin Pogrebin • Ian Williams • Naomi Wolf • Elizabeth Wurtzel • Cathy Young

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393311914
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/1994
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eric Liu, twenty-nine, has been a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a commentator for MSNBC. A regular contributor to Slate,
he has also written for The Washington
Post Magazine and USA Weekend. After founding The Next Progressive, an acclaimed journal of opinion, he edited the anthology Next:
Young American Writers on the New Generation. He is a graduate of Yale College and is now enrolled at Harvard Law School.

Editorial Reviews

Most of the writers collected here fall deep into muddy generalizations such as those in David Greenberg's idyll to his own halcyon version of the '60s: ``They had communes; we get Melrose Place. They had the Pill; we get AIDS.'' One wonders, has he heard of Vietnam? Greenberg isn't the only 20-something writer who muffles his voice by burying it under the pillow of the past. Ian Williams starts his selection by telling how much he hates ``ain't-we-kids-got-angst'' generalizations and then proceeds to rant for 10 pages against the baby boomers. Eric Liu, the book's editor doesn't fare much better in his ``A Chinaman's Chance: Reflections on the American Dream.'' He chews the cud with phrases like ``national creed,'' ``freedom and opportunity'' and ``common responsibility.'' Surely we can expect more from ``Young Writers.'' Aren't they supposed to have new phrases that are combustible and arch? Not all the selections are dim. The good pieces are like Lalo Lopez's ``Generation Mex,'' in which the author views the generic subject as a sidebar to his own idiosyncratic story, beginning with a defiant glossary: ``vendido (ven-dee-doh) Sell out, see Hispanic. `Lalo wrote that essay for that gringo book. What a vendido!' '' Perhaps the best is Ted Kleine's ``Living the Lansing Dream.'' Unlike some of his co-contributors, his style is detail-rich so the result is a great story about a uniquely rendered trilogy--Kleine, Lansing and the '90s. Anthologies are the relay races of the literary world; in them, a team of writers hand off a topic like some sort of baton. Unfortunately, the baton in Next is a bit too big for most of the writers to carry. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly