With teenybopper movies clogging multiplexes and bubblegum pop jamming radio airwaves, it's only fitting that the 25-and-under set has infiltrated the book world, too. Faster than you can say ''Bret Easton who?'' publishers are snapping up precocious literary ingenues.
''Now people are more willing to take a risk with a first-time author,'' says Warner Books' publicity manager, Tina Andreadis. ''There's this passion that young writers have that a lot of publishers are recognizing.''
The most youthful of the lot is 14-year-old Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, touted as the pubescent successor to goth queen Anne Rice. She began tapping out her first novel, the vampire-themed In the Forests of the Night, at age 13 and landed a book deal with Delacorte one year later. Not bad for a high schooler who balances a tiger Beanie Baby on her head for inspiration.
Then there's Richard Mason, 21, an Oxford-educated Hugh Grant look-alike who's already caused quite a stir across the pond with his tragic upper-class love story, The Drowning People, and a two-book contract for a reported $835,000 with Warner in the States.
Other up-and-comers include Jedediah Purdy, a 24-year-old home-schooled prodigy who penned For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (Knopf); 25-year-old Kate Morgenroth, a former HarperCollins assistant who landed a two-book deal with the publisher after boldly showing a top honcho the manuscript for Kill Me First; and 25-year-old Swiss writer Zoe Jenny, whose just-out The Pollen Room (Simon & Schuster) has drawn comparisons to The Catcher in the Rye and is already an international best-seller.
And we thought Britney Spears was all that.
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