a promising writer, an excellent cab driver

I should have gotten to these earlier, but Granta's new(ish) list of Best Young American Novelists is out. The magazine proper shows in a few weeks.
Nice to see Kevin Brockmeier and Olga Grushin on the list, but I wonder about Jim Shepard not being there, for one.
For a little historical perspective, here's the list from ten years ago.
If some of them seem unfamiliar, well apparently there's very little money in all this.
Perhaps the key graf in the Guardian blog is, this:
"The top 10% earned 50% of the total income earned by writers in 2005-06, compared to the bottom 50% who earned less than 10% of the total."
The damn shame, as Bookninja notes is that this is a downward trend.
Worse still, it takes awhile to get ones chops together and build an audience. By then, many writers are too broke to continue.

Posted by Dave