Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron, acting as Guernica‘s Guest Fiction Editor for the January 1-15 issue, chose to feature the younger generation’s work in Israeli literature.
From his introductory essay:
First off, we are defined by who we are not: we are not the established, famous, celebrated older generation of Israeli authors. It would do injustice to them as much as it would to us to group them together and define them as one unit, but I would dare define them as serious authors, makers of stylistic literary fiction that deals with the “big” issues of Israeli society in the last half-century: wars, Arabs, the emergence of the state, the Holocaust aftershock, and so on. Now, it is not that we younger writers are not serious, or that we shy away from dealing with topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Holocaust—not at all; we still live in the same reality. But, I would suggest, we offer a different tone; call it lighter, more cutting edge, or daring: whatever it is, we don’t seem to carry the same weight on our shoulders. And while the previous generation demonstrated a social coherence, we offer a more fragmented, varied outlook for our country.
