The most recent issue of Granta magazine admits that it is ambitious. "Now we have expanded beyond the English language to bring you the next Mario Vargas Llosas and Roberto Bolaños," it boasts. Indeed, the collection of stories from young Spanish-language novelists tastes like Bolaño and Llosa: each story exhibits that distinct combination of gothic, meta-literary and political fiction which is only found in Spanish-language writing. And it is true that, in the margin of ‘The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable’ (Carlos Labbé, Chile), I couldn’t help writing "Pierre Ménard".

The most promising stories are those which depart from their tradition and cleverly invert the typical subjects of sex, writing, and the dissatisfaction of youth. Andrés Barba’s story ‘The Coming Flood’ is an odd gem, beginning with a line not fully understood until the end: "First her ears hear; they open. Then her eyes can see; they open. Her face, a revolving door, swings open and shut, open and shut." She, Mónica, fantasizes about getting a small horn attached to her forehead, but the perverted plot does not undermine its seriousness, and its prose is deliberate.

Some of the stories, and particularly the excerpts, fall predictably short of escaping postmodernist discourse: half of them refer to consumerism or the ‘void’. Moreover, many of the pieces succumb to irresolution dribbled with lightly intriguing observations: "couplehood: the abjection of observing and participating in the other person’s obsessions" (‘Gerardo’s Letters’) or "Spending is about the fear of dying" (‘Eva and Diego’). ‘The Hotel Life’ (Javier Montes), however, is self-aware: it begins as a dull story about an idiosyncratic hotel reviewer, but becomes engrossing when the character and reader are simultaneously surprised (exhilarated?) by a cold pornography shoot in the reviewer’s room.

Other highlights include ‘In Utah There Are Mountains Too’ (Federico Falco, Argentina), which tells the story of a young atheist girl who falls in love with a Mormon missionary; ‘After Helena’ (Andrés Neuman, Argentina), which detachedly explores enmity and grief; and ‘The Bonfire and the Chessboard’ (Matías Néspolo, Argentina), an eerie and absurd story conflating reality and a chess tournament, in whose margin I wrote "David Lynch".

Granta was founded in Cambridge in 1889, and has a knack for predicting trends in contemporary writing. This issue endeavours to defy the pitfalls of translation, and despite qualms about originality, we have not heard the last from any of these novelists – who are young but neither dissatisfied, nor naïve.