“20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker” Edited by Deborah Treisman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pages, $16)

In 1999, The New Yorker magazine anointed 20 writers under the age of 40 as the future of American fiction. The list became justly famous because so many of the magazine’s picks – including now-ensconced heavyweights such as Sherman Alexie, Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody and William T. Vollmann – panned out.

Attention was therefore paid in June when The New Yorker announced a new list – of 20 “North American writers under the age of 40,” this time – whom it believed “were, or soon would be, standouts” in the world of contemporary fiction.

Each selected writer was required to have completed at least one book or manuscript as well as a portion of whatever work – either a short story or part of a novel – was coming next. Initially published by the magazine last summer, these selections have been gathered in a modestly priced paperback, just in time for the holidays.

One could quarrel with some of the selections, which are evenly divided between men and women and include writers born in Nigeria, Peru, Latvia, China, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia and Russia.

The magazine’s use of the term “North American” simply required that a writer “make a home” in the United States or Canada, leaving room on the list for Dinaw Mengestu (who lives in Paris). But the list somehow doesn’t include Zadie Smith (a tenured professor at New York University) or Booker-prize winning Kiran Desai (a permanent U.S. resident), perhaps because neither one had a piece of fiction ready by the magazine’s deadline.

Among U.S.-born writers, I particularly miss Julie Orringer, whose sweeping and ambitious new novel (“The Invisible Bridge”) amply justifies the praise heaped on her debut short-story collection (“How to Breathe Underwater”).

Focusing on what’s here rather than pining for what’s not, I wouldn’t be surprised if a decade from now, a substantial majority of these writers are playing in the same league as their 1999 predecessors.

Some of the writers in this new group – including Jonathan Safran Foer, the most prominent name on the list – already are there, and Foer’s elliptical “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly,” covering the history of a marriage in six pages, is the shortest and one of the best in this volume.

Three more of the selections – by established writers Mengestu, Nicole Krauss and Gary Shteyngart – come from novels published this year; all three novels were included in The New York Times list of this year’s 100 notable books, and all three writers also have published prior, critically acclaimed novels.

The Shteyngart selection comes from early in his novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” which easily makes my top 10 list for 2010. Set in a dystopian future in which we’ve surrendered our freedom and much of our intelligence to the electronic devices that increasingly dominate our lives, Shteyngart’s novel nevertheless dares to dream a different language, built from an improbable romance and the irrepressible human urges that no machine can control.

Among those giving voice to such urges in Shteyngart’s “Lenny Hearts Eunice” are the children who embody the prospect of an alternative future:

“I relished hearing language actually being spoken by children,” the main character tells us. “Overblown verbs, explosive nouns, beautifully bungled prepositions. Language, not data.”

Language runs riot in a number of these selections, and as one might expect from a collection showcasing younger writers, it frequently features children.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum ‘s “The Erlking” is a whimsical modern-day riff on Goethe’s darker tale. Taking place at an “Elves’ Faire” promising “an unpolluted, media-free experience of the world,” its voice-driven narrative shifts between an anxious mother who is hopelessly tangled in that world’s web and her child’s rich, fantasy-driven efforts to live elsewhere.

Tea Obreht ‘s poetic “Blue Water Djinn” takes us inside a young boy’s vivid imagination as he merges his first experience with death, involving a drowning, into tales he has heard about a shipwreck and the spirits that haunt it:

“He has seen their lights around the ship at night, the green glow of their underwater torches, and he imagines them hovering in the waterworn doorways, their mouths red with the flesh of men, their wrists braceleted in seaweed, singing, weaving moonbeams into their hair.”

For children in other pieces, early encounters with an unforgiving reality are less dreamy, but just as vividly rendered.

Chris Adrian ‘s “The Warm Fuzzies” traces the link between a young girl’s initiation into sex and the smarmy evangelical Christianity against which she rebels. C.E. Morgan ‘s “Twins” and ZZ Packer ‘s “Dayward” – the first set in late-20th-century Cincinnati and the second during Reconstruction in the South – show us the distorting influence of racism in young children’s lives.

Reflecting the foreign origins of many of the writers included here, a number of selections involve the equally dramatic alterations undergone by immigrants, who abandon often untenable pasts for futures in which they remain strangers in a strange land.

Mengestu’s “An Honest Exit” and Yiyun Li ‘s “The Science of Flight” are the best from this subset, which also includes pieces by Daniel Alarcon, David Bezmozgis and Nell Freudenberger.

Chosen from the most arresting section of his novel “How to Read the Air,” the Mengestu piece is a harrowing account of a father’s efforts to leave a devastated Ethiopia for a new life in America.

Li describes a Chinese immigrant living in Iowa who, having “become accustomed to who she was in other people’s eyes,” has long lost track of who she is. She cobbles together a self from “the stolen pieces and memories” of “other people’s lives.”

A sense that we are living others’ lives rather than our own runs through many of these selections, reflecting the electronic chatter that makes it increasingly difficult to think and live for ourselves.

In his dystopian accounts of workplace hell, Joshua Ferris has made this theme his own, and he contributes a customarily funny – and paranoid – account that includes a hilarious send-up of a familiar anxiety: waiting for someone to reply to an e-mail and wondering whether it should have been sent in the first place.

The narrator of Ferris’ “The Pilot” is a writer, as is Nadia, narrator of Krauss’ “The Young Painters,” excerpted from her recently published novel “Great House” (also on my 2010 top 10 list).

Appropriating and writing others’ lives, Nadia gradually hollows out her own, in a cautionary tale of the perils awaiting any writer when success becomes more important than the creative impulse that first spawned it.

Having been included in the elite company gathered here, each of these writers will wrestle with this demon in the years to come; it is among the pitfalls that obsessed and eventually paralyzed one of the most gifted writers on the 1999 list: David Foster Wallace.

One can’t predict how these writers will handle whatever fame and fortune come their way. But the talent on display – and what its editors refer to as the “clear sense of ambition” characterizing this volume’s best selections – will spur any reader to reach back for what these writers already have done, while eagerly awaiting their work to come.

THE LIST

Here, listed alphabetically – also the order in which their selections appear in the book – are the 20 writers chosen by The New Yorker. Given ages are as of Dec. 12. Chris Adrian, now 40, was 39 when The New Yorker announced its list.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 33

Chris Adrian, 40

Daniel Alarcon, 33

David Bezmozgis, 37

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, 38

Joshua Ferris, 36

Jonathan Safran Foer, 33

Nell Freudenberger, 35

Rivka Galchen, 34

Nicole Krauss, 36

Yiyun Li, 38

Dinaw Mengestu, 32

Philipp Meyer, 36

C.E. Morgan, 34

Tea Obreht, 25

ZZ Packer, 37

Karen Russell, 29

Salvatore Scibona, 35

Gary Shteyngart, 38

Wells Tower, 37

Mike Fischer is a Milwaukee writer and lawyer.