When Mark Haskell Smith wrote in yesterday to ask, "Who's to say that Bret Easton Ellis isn't as 'classic' as Melville?", Benjamin Kessler couldn't help but respond. "Ellis clearly isn't," Kessler emails. "The term 'classic' is (mostly) an honor bestowed in hindsight. As Rachel Kahan pointed out, artists whose works make it into the canon were often misunderstood in their lifetime, because they were doing something new, as Melville, Joyce, Nabokov, etc. were. Ellis, on the other hand, has been perfectly understood in his lifetime. His works created the controversy that they were written to create, and Ellis has reaped the profits of his savvy marketing."

"Similarly," Kessler continues, "Interpol isn't the best pop act to choose when attempting to illustrate the Newness of the new. They're a ripoff band, not the inventors of an up-to-date sound like Timbaland or an r&b innovator like R. Kelly. So the issue becomes not old vs. new but innovators vs. copycats. Where are the risk-taking novelists, the ones whose books constitute a formal and emotional adventure? I know of some (Gaitskill, D.F. Wallace, and Pynchon, to name a few examples), but no young ones. It may indeed be true, though I hope it's not, that Generation Y, being half-educated, has nothing original to say and is fully satisfied with novels about how to find a nice apartment in Brooklyn and book-length comix (er, graphic novels)."

I'm going to have to throw in a few younger names here for Kessler's (and your) consideration: David Mitchell, Yannick Murphy, Lydia Millet, Joshua Ferris, and, hell yes, Jonathan Safran Foer and even Mark Z. Danielewski, though I confess that's more a matter of respect than fandom on my part. (Also, David Foster Wallace isn't young? Now I feel old.) And then I'm going to namecheck John Hodgman, even though you're all going to be "Whuh?", and even though he doesn't write fiction, because he is absolutely a marvelous formalist, we none of us deny that, but there's also an essay he wrote for an anthology called Only Child that chokes me up just to think about, months later, and if that's not emotional impact, I don't know what is. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of names here, trying to write on the fly, and you can fill in the gaps.

Finally, on the graphic novel front, I'll throw in a quick plug for Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, which I think is one of his most engaging (and engaged) stories yet, Nick Abadzis's Laika, and this copy of Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's Shooting War that just showed up in the mailbox, because the parts I read online months and months ago absolutely blew me away.