Readers might be familiar with some of the names here – Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole Krauss, Kevin Brockmeier - but there's plenty to be introduced to. If the 1996 collection was plagued with questions about what it means to be 'American', then this collection reconsiders the question from the skewed, damaged perspective of those whose can never quite fit in. If the writers in Granta's 1996 list were mostly 'suburbanites' these writers are itinerant travellers. A third of the writers gathered here spent some of their childhood growing up outside the US. When they address events within recent history, like Vietnam, it feels like new territory is being covered. Gabe Hudson writes in 'Hard Core' of a half-Vietnamese man fighting in the Iraq war, whose sister becomes a porn star and peace activist, after a sexual attack of an unspecified nature by him and his childhood friend. The two most powerful, engaging pieces deal with hidden histories in the US. The sublime ZZ Packer's extract from her novel-in-progress Buffalo Soldiers depicts black soldiers in the Civil War. In an extract from Passover in New Orleans Dara Horn writes of Jewish Confederates, observing Passover - the meal of freed slaves.

The short story form has become hugely popular again, so it's interesting to see how the novelists in the collection cope with a smaller canvas. The polymath Uzodinma Iweala wrote of child soldiers in Beasts of No Nation; in his story, 'Dance Cadaverous', an American teenage boy with Nigerian Christian parents has a gay encounter which leaves his parents more confused than him. Nell Freudenberger, meanwhile, deals expertly with the theme of cultural sensitivity: in 'Where East Meets West', an elderly American grandmother's concerns about behaving 'correctly' in front of her granddaughter's Asian boyfriend arise more from fear of being seen as old-fashioned than any sense of political correctness.

A heavy streak of slipstream fantasy invades three of the best stories in the collection. In 'The Barn at the End' Karen Russell imagines all the dead American presidents have been reincarnated as retired farm horses. Absurd and brilliant humour gives way to a sad meditation on ambition. Kevin Brockmeier deploys his typically elegiac style, in 'Parakeets', a surreal tale of a man with a stock of never-depleting parakeets that recreate the sounds of his daily life with their mimicry. Jonathan Safran Foer's tricksy piece 'Rooms' unfolds slowly, only allowing the reader to get their bearings at the end. Conversely, Nicole Krauss generously leaves the reader to use their imagination as to what the subject is in the painting described in her story 'My Painter'. 

The selection is a near-definitive overview of the most exciting writers in the US. Do you judge the writers' from what they've written or what they're going to write in the future? On the strength of this anthology, it's probably okay to do both.