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.

The New Dance Floor Queen: Roll over Madge, tell Kylie the news. A breakout star thirteen years in the making, Roísín Murphy has finally arrived.

Teasing the cheering, sweaty throngs at a Manhattan nightclub on her first-ever U.S. solo gig, Irish singer Roísín Murphy coyly referred to the long wait her diehard fans have had to endure: “I was beginning to wonder how long we could keep going like this, New York, but I’m here now.” It was the only understatement of the night -- she really has arrived. Murphy emerged sporting a blinding silver space-age glitter sheath and android-like eye band, after all, and the intoxicating songs on her impending second solo album Overpowered are anything but quiet. The former singer for acclaimed ’90s electronica duo Moloko has already become an underground dance sensation the world over, and she is more than primed for the big time with this new collection of bubbly disco, brassy pop and elastic funk workouts that gets its mojo from Murphy’s burnished blue-eyed soul singing.

The New Ingenue: Tired of guest stints on the small screen, actress Kat Dennings risks one of her nine lives while on the prowl for Hollywood notoriety.

According to her acting coach, Kat Dennings should just “forget about the whole acting thing.” According to her mother, going into the profession was “a terrible idea.” According to casting agents, “her teeth are too weird, she’s funny looking, not pretty enough and too fat.” Luckily, Michael Cera’s love interest in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, who also stole scenes in The House Bunny and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is made of stern stuff. “Yeah, I’m not easily swayed,” says the 22-year-old with a lazy drawl. “I’m a pretty strong-willed person and the criticism doesn’t really bother me.” Instead, Dennings stayed focused, abandoned acting classes altogether and served her apprenticeship on small-screen staples like ER, CSI (both Crime Scene Investigation and NY) and Sex and the City before graduating to Hollywood.

The New Rebel: West Coast artist Karl Haendel cuts through to the bleeding heart of liberal America with his insidious take on the state of the nation.

Karl Haendel has never been much of a team player. “I have no interest in aligning myself and my work with a specific set of identity politics,” says the 32-year-old artist from his studio in Los Angeles. “For so many artists, it’s like, I’m a black lesbian. I’m overweight. My momma was like this. I had two daddies.” Haendel’s visual roasting of contemporary culture -- a guillotined Dubya, colorful I Heart Abortion installations -- raises frustrating questions without the promise of answers.

The New Sharpshooter: 15-year-old prodigy Eleanor Hardwick is about to change the face of contemporary photography. But first, she’s got heaps of algebra homework to finish

When commissioned to take the self-portrait that accompanies this profile, 15-year-old photographer Eleanor Hardwick, who looks like a knotty Ian McEwan character come to life, says, “I’ll be quite busy tomorrow, as after school I’m going on an English trip to the theatre!” It’s this cherubic schoolgirl inexperience mixed with Cindy Sherman’s fractured self-reflexivity and the death-obsessed romanticism of Tierney Gearon that makes her such a welcome anomaly in the art world. First discovered by Dazed Digital, the online extension of Dazed & Confused magazine, in which her works appear alongside those of visionaries such as Hedi Slimane and Gareth Pugh, she has since worked with Bat for Lashes siren Natasha Khan and other cross-pollinating arbiters of fashion, music and fine art. This year alone, she’ll exhibit her work in three European shows.

The New Clairvoyants: Tuning into emerging trends and future sounds, Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais of Telepathe deliver experimental electro-pop to the mainstream.

Melissa Livaudais remembers the catalyst that jumpstarted a double leap into the music industry. “We realized that we’d been fired from every job we’d ever had,” says the boyishly beautiful half of Brooklyn’s Telepathe, adding, “We are pretty much incapable of doing anything else.” Focusing on the more productive sides of their personalities, she and bandmate Busy Gangnes, a former dancer and part-time yoga instructor, quickly graduated from “amorphous jam sessions” to calculated, sycophantic drones that borrow equally from Glass Candy’s minimal pop and the impassioned spoken-word poetry of Amiri Baraka.

The New Polyglot Sexpot: Brazilian actress Alice Braga straddles the border between indie and mainstream success, gaining everything in translation.

As a Hollywood starlet on the rise, primped and surrounded on every side by a gaggle of publicists, handlers and managers, sometimes the only refuge from the madness is cultural. “Let’s do this interview in Spanish,” says Alice Braga, near whisper, as her entourage swirls around a suite in midtown Manhattan’s Regency Hotel. “That way we can have some privacy.” Moments of tranquility are scarce for the São Paulo-born actress, who made her debut in 2002 in Fernando Meirelles’ groundbreaking City of God, and has been bagging accolades and plum roles ever since. The svelte, raven-haired 25 year old has smoothly crossed over from South American indie crush to Hollywood big time without sacrificing her magnetic Brazilian heritage, from popcorn epics like Will Smith’s I Am Legend to more cerebral fare like 2008’s Blindness, in which she starred alongside Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

The New Adbuster: Taking his cue from big-box advertisers, artist Hank Willis Thomas hijacks the boardroom and tackles the politics of visual culture.

Talk about brand recognition. Art critics first took note of photographer Hank Willis Thomas in 2006 for his B®ANDED series, which explored the representation of the African American male body in visual culture. Thomas has since continued the interrogation by repurposing -- and altogether re-contextualizing -- ad campaign imagery (in 2004’s Afro-American Express, for example, he is featured as a card-carrying member since 1619, the year indentured Africans were first shipped to America). Stripped of text and digitally manipulated, Thomas’ work unearths the insidious underbelly of marketing, and an industry determined to turn profit at any cost.

The New Songbird: Raise a toast to Polly Scattergood, as she carves out her own inimitable brand of pink pop alongside Björk and Kate Bush.

If listening to “Nitrogen Pink,” the tinkly, bubble-burst debut single from Polly Scattergood, sounds like stumbling upon some kind of harmonious magical accident, it’s partly because you have. “I don’t really know how I write songs,” says the 21-year-old Londoner. “They just sort of pop out. If I stopped to think about it too much, nothing would ever come out right.” Hailed by the British press as the apparent musical lovechild of Björk and Kate Bush, Scattergood weaves tales that are both strangely beautiful and breathlessly intimate.

The Renaissance Man: Copenhagen-based fashion designer, filmmaker, musician and artist Henrik Vibskov claims his title as the greatest Dane this side of the Øresund Strait.

Henrik Vibskov’s propensity for the crazy conceptual bleeds into every facet of his career. Take, for example, the 36-year-old fashion designer’s spring/summer 2008 show, in which the runway resembled an intergalactic landscape straight out of Forbidden Planet, strewn with blue stalactites and an odd, percussion-heavy soundtrack provided by Vibskov himself (he moonlights as a drummer for the Danish electronic musician Trentemøller). A new fashion crush for the likes of Purple, Self Service and i-D, the blue-eyed designer’s aesthetic wavers somewhere between 1980s-inspired geometric shapes and whimsical, textured prints done up in vibrant colors. “In the beginning,” he says, smiling, “we had a little show and a big party, and now it’s the opposite, because the party got a little too big.”

Photo: Alastair Wiper