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Love The New Yorker but looking for something a little cooler, a little more youthful? Want thick, twisty fiction and high-brow commentary with an edge? Enter The American Reader, our new favorite journal of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism, which just launched this fall both in print and online. We highly recommend you check it out, and if you need a little incentive, Editor-in-Chief Uzoamaka Maduka and the other editors on her staff have picked a few of their favorite upcoming writers — both from the pages of The American Reader and elsewhere — that they think are about to hit the big time to share with you here. Check out their list after the jump, and (if you can bring yourself to share the wealth) add any burgeoning young geniuses you happen to know about in the comments.

Based on the strength of his debut collection, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, I think it’s fair to say that Damion Searls is one of the best writers of fiction working today. The collection — swift, meticulous, self-referential and comically clinical — is reminiscent of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds. — Jac Mullen