Poor Mojo's Newswire

Book 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? The row began when the controversial critic Lee Siegel 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 for ever. "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." As the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, awarded on Thursday in London, recognised the importance of the new book by American journalist Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, the debate Siegel has re-started raged on in books pages and on literary websites. Will American fiction ever compete again with non-fiction for contemporary relevance, critics in both camps are asking. Siegel's assault on America's novelists was prompted by the publication of the New Yorker's annual "20 Under 40" list of new writers, but it has exposed a bitterness at the heart of the world of books. Railing against "the New Yorker's self-promoting, vulgar list" of favoured newcomers, Siegel smears the whole literary pack as being damagingly self-referential and led by the nose by publicists. Calling for new talent and new genres, he laments the fact that nobody bothered to question the "20 Under 40" selection.

SAN FRANCISCO—Libraries are expanding e-book offerings with out-of-print editions, part of a broader effort to expand borrowing privileges in the Internet Age that could challenge traditional ideas about copyright. Starting Tuesday, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, are joining forces to create a one-stop website for checking out e-books, including access to more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries. . . . To read the books, borrowers around the world can download and read them for free on computers or e-reading gadgets. Software renders the books inaccessible once the loan period ends. Two-thirds of American libraries offered e-book loans in 2009, according to a survey by the American Library Association. But those were mostly contemporary imprints from the last couple of years—say, the latest Stephen King novel. The Internet Archive project, dubbed Openlibrary.org, goes a step further by opening up some access to the sorts of books that may have otherwise gathered dust on library shelves—mainly those published in the past 90 years, but of less popular interest.

It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award. In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people­—and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award. By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies­—and some human “cheeseballs” want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays. And with Realware, the humans and robots reach a higher plateau.