SO JAZZED THAT American writers of more hues and cultures are winning wide recognition and critical acclaim, including Junot Diaz, Dinaw Mengestu, Krys Lee, and others who are eroding borders and shaping a new fictional language.

They represent a new generation of global urban writers, the progeny of Sandra Cisneros, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe. A polyglot, mulatto, mashed-up crew of young writers who reflect a dynamic world spirit that only will grow.  No brush-painting in that cloying, annoying, colonial voice that old-school publishers loved to court.

Are modern-day demographics, cultures, and commerce finally rising and converging, creating what journalist Guy Garcia has called the “new mainstream”?  Will “ethnic lit” no longer be ghettoized?  Are outsiders the new insiders?  Is exotic the new norm?  Are the “other” now us?  And can we stop using the word diaspora?  For those who yearn for more literature of all shades, we’ve been waiting a lifetime for the rise of the next-gen global literati.  I have no doubt that we’re at the cusp of a new cultural ethos.

Lest you think I’m p.c., the new breed of global scribes may be led by living white male Dave Eggers, the San Francisco-based author of A Hologram for the King. Where does this transcultural freak fit? He’s a cipher, a chameleon, beyond typecasting. Was he born that way, flying Lady Gaga-like from his mother’s loins? He’s the Bruno Mars of literature. He not only bashes borders, he transcends them, reshapes them.

At a certain point, the lines blur — no longer really matter. That’s the point with great lit authors, isn’t it? Transcendent writing that defies definition, yet defines us in that, how you say, universal way? Nothing is lost in translation, especially for readers who aren’t multilinguini and can’t speak grammar too well. The cultural parameters vanish, and the fine work speaks for itself.

Eggers has been dubbed heir apparent to the late Norman Mailer by author Pico Iyer. Norman Mailer? Eggers descends from a mashed-up, border-hopping, multicultural canon, from dead white and black males to living writers of all hues and persuasions: James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Edmund White, Iyer, and others.

Everyman Eggers and his kin are trekking far and wide, showing us fresh new literary lands. Trash the TV, and try them.

(Photo, above) “Junot Diaz” by Christopher Peterson, via Creative Commons license on Wikimedia Commons.

(Photo, above) “Dave Eggers” by David Shankbone, under a Creative Commons license on Wikipedia.