The works of the late 1980s and 1990s from a new generation of Spanish writers have proved popular but have been dismissed with disdain by many established critics. Some of these writers achieved recognition very young, as in the cases of Pedro Maestre, whose Matando dinosaurios con tirachinas won the 1996 Premio Nadal, and José Ángel Mañas and Juana Salabert, shortlisted for that same prize in 1994 and 1996 respectively for Historias del Kronen and Arde lo que será (Urioste 1997–98). Some, more openminded critics have seen this new crop of writers not only as professionally successful but also as representative of a generation far removed historically from the Franco regime, having come to adulthood in a democratic society (Dorca 1997). As Urioste puts it (1997–98: 457), these are writers who seem to embrace the ethos of the new democracy: youth, success, and change.

Those writers were born in the late 1960s, but there are others born in the early 1970s who are of the same generation, the equivalent of Coupland's ‘Generation X’ (1991). Though the following list is not exhaustive, the names that crop up most frequently in discussion are: Almudena Grandes, Mercedes Abad, Benjamín Prado, Gabriela Bustelo, Roger Wolfe, Belén Gopegui, Ángela Vallvey, Lucía Etxebarria, Juan Bonilla, Ray Loriga, Daniel Mújica, Juan Manuel Prada, Care Santos, José Machado, and Espido Freire (Izquierdo 2001). The work of these young writers and their coherence as a group are often debated in terms of their aesthetic preferences and thematic choices, although Encinar and Glenn (2005: 12–14) do not use the term ‘literary generation’ in this connection, given the differences between them in terms of style and subject matter, preferring to see them as a series of subgroups with distinct literary styles but all affected in different ways by the experience of the Franco dictatorship. Considering the extent to which literary expression was conditioned by political reality only a few decades ago (by both censorship and ideology), it is unsurprising that these writers have attracted such attention, seen as they are as the first clear beneficiaries of democratic change. From this perspective, even the differences between them are worth examining closely. We shall in this chapter focus on the subgroup usually identified with Coupland's ‘Generation X’ and whose work could be considered the most representative of their peers, not only in terms of critical attention but also because of certain features they have in common.