According the UK's Guardian, "pundits in the United States are being urged to line up on one side or other this summer: Is the American novel finally dead or not?" Controversial critic Lee Siegel, called "a famous sock puppet" by the online Gawker.com, wrote a piece for the New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of fire, has lost its spark forever."For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers." Is the American novel dead? Is the novel still an important force in culture? Should we still be studying novels? Or is Seigel right, the best stuff really is non-fiction?
According the UK's Guardian, "pundits in the United States are being urged to line up on one side or other this summer: Is the American novel finally dead or not?" Controversial critic Lee Siegel, called "a famous sock puppet" by the online Gawker.com, wrote a piece for the New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of fire, has lost its spark forever."For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers." Is the American novel dead? Is the novel still an important force in culture? Should we still be studying novels? Or is Seigel right, the best stuff really is non-fiction?
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