5 under 35 fiction writers to watch (and read)

Being such a fan of Sana Krasikov's "One More Year,'' I was happy to hear the National Book Foundation is taking notice of her, as my colleague David Mehegan reports below. (Click on FULL ENTRY below for my post from last month about her story collection.) I was also pleased to see Nam Le, fiction editor of the Harvard Review and author of the story collection "The Boat," on the list as well. (I wrote about him in Shelf Life (third item) this spring.)

The new Jhumpa Lahiri?

I've just finished Sana Krasikov's story collection, "One More Year.'' Her stories capture the experiences of US immigrants from Russia and Georgia as well as those back home trying to eke out an existence. The title refers to a theme that runs throughout the collection -- people in search of a better life find that temporary arrangements have somehow become permanent. "One more year" is what a mother working in New York tells her teenage son when he wonders how much longer they will live on different continents. He comes to visit her from Tbilisi, but she's already lost him. It's heartbreaking.

Krasikov's mother is from Ukraine and her father is from Georgia. She grew up in both places and she writes what she knows with an amazing beauty and force.