The Literary Brat Pack

Jay McInerney would later say of the Literary Brat Pack, a cohort of twentysomething fiction writers with flashy debuts in the mid-1980s, that “I had less to gain” than the rest of them because “I was the one who’d been there first,” meaning it was his own book, Bright Lights, Big City (Vintage Contemporaries, 182 pages), that established the trend of taking a lurid, minimalist, autofictional novel by a young person and selling it as something more than a book, as a cultural event, the blooming of a generational “voice.”