The New Shortlist: BlackBook asked two very different, very established writers—London bad boy Sebastian Horsley and New York literary royalty Jay McInerney—to crack spines. HERE, they nominate the best new voices in American fiction.

Once a promising keyboardist for bands like the Brian Jonestown Massacre, writer Tony O’Neill fell into a black hole of heroin and crack addiction. Now, with his new novel Down and Out on Murder Mile (HarperCollins) -- a tragic but hilarious redemption story about two addicts who move from Los Angeles to London’s corrupt “murder mile” -- the Brooklyn-based scribe embraces his second chance and revisits the demons of his drug-fueled past.

Never mind his bollocks. With compelling, controversial works that call into question everyone from Pollock to Pacino, Norwegian punk artist Gardar Eide Einarsson reinvents the men of American myth.

Over whiskey and beer at Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel, lofty ruminations on contemporary art crumble as the conversation turns to Gardar Eide Einarsson’s penis. “I know!” he says of Lars von Trier, the photograph in which he appears wearing nothing but a T-shirt alongside fellow artist Gareth James. “My little sister Googled me at her school library to show her friends my work and, well, she found more than she bargained for.” Nudity has become a theme throughout Einarsson’s career, as photographers and critics continue to equate the tattoos that cover much of his body with his general punk aesthetic. “It’s so crazy,” he says. “One time, a German newspaper asked me to take off my shirt in a museum, in front of one of my paintings. Can you imagine how lame that would have looked?”