M.T. Anderson

I can't recommend M.T. 'Tobin' Anderson highly enough. Young adults seem to be a readership that hold on to literary quality well into the pleasures of 'genre' fiction, and Anderson is a very fine example of the type.  I first read his dyad 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation', the narrative of a boy growing up through the American War of Independence, and seeing the moral hollowness behind the great declarations of independence and equality.

More recently I have been reading his book 'Feed', a stylish science fiction, perhaps best-shorthanded as an update to 'Brave New World' for the internet age.  The 'Feed' is the whispering of advertising, augmenting reality all day, every day, everywhere you go.  The protagonist is a young man, Titus (like the biblical Titus, in a gluttonous world & like Titus Groan, in a world that wants you for a component not a whole), who is mentally alive in ways that his friends are not, in a culture which is not. The language is mostly the ugly, lazy, slangy language you can hear on the train or anywhere young people are typical.

Having gone to the moon for kicks, Titus and his friends Link and Marty have gone to a zero-grav funhouse, failed to have fun and are now preparing to eat.  Titus has been watching, attracted, a blond girl in grey who has watchful eyes. His friends arrive:

... they came in and immediately Link and Marty started doing these gymnastics, and they got in trouble, so I could stay watching her without them being a mob on me.  This guy, he was from the club, he was yelling at them because they wouldn't stay out of the snack bar, which was off-bounds for still bouncing.
  Behind the girl in grey was a big window and you could see we were in a bubble way high up over the moon.  Down on the ground, tourists were riding big proteins across the craters.  All the stars were out.
  The guy was still yelling at the others over by the valve. He was all 'da da da be removed from the premises, da da da express instructions, da da.'  I lowered my head and turned it toward the girl in gray.
  When she thought no one was looking, she opened her mouth. Something trembled there.  Juice.  She had filled her mouth with juice.
  Da da da, liability, da da da, think you're doing.  I shifted. I watched the juice. For her own amusement she was letting it go, gentle and sexy.
 
She just opened her mouth and pushed it out gently with her tongue.  The juice came out of her lips as if it was being extracted real careful by a rock-star dentist who she loved.

The contrast between the way Titus thinks and narrates what his life is about when with his friends and the feed, and the way he is when with the girl in grey, Violet, is the engine of the story.

I can't think of many writers who I regard as highly for being both writerly and real.