In June 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts warned every book lover in America that the sky was falling. Publishing a report entitled Reading at Risk, the NEA concluded, from twenty years of data and a sampling of nearly seventeen thousand subjects, that “literary reading” (defined as anything fictional, including novels, plays, short stories, and poetry) had dropped sharply across every age, ethnic, economic, and geographic group in the nation. “ America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted,” declared NEA chairman Dana Gioia. If nothing changed, he warned, a well-read citizenry would be a thing of the past, a “vast cultural impoverishment” the result. Although Chairman Gioia stressed that the crisis had “no single solution and no single cause,” the report didn’t waste any time noting that as rates of reading slid, consumption of television, video games, and online media were swelling menacingly like a tumor on America’s cultural consciousness.

All month long the report winged its way across newspapers, public radio airwaves, online discussion boards, and literary weblogs. Judgments were swift. Nobody brought up Reading at Risk and then said, “I need more data before I can tell you what I think.” If you loved books, you either (a) were shocked, or (b) figured the NEA was simply saying what you had known all along. Given a minute, you probably said, (a) “Something has to be done,” or (b) “Nothing can be done.” Example A: Mitch Kaplan, owner of Miami ’s Books and Books, one of the country’s most successful independents, called the report “our call to arms.” Example B: In an imperious op-ed in the New York Times, writer Andrew Solomon bellowed that “a crisis in reading is a crisis in national health. . . . A crisis in reading is a crisis in national politics,” then proposed no solution. No, wait; he did: “To encourage that great thrill of finding kinship in shared experiences of books.” Like no one had thought of that yet.

I took a lot of calls and e-mails about the report that month and tried to stay true to my initial reaction. It made me sad. But something beneath that disappointment stunk up the joint, double-talk that proclaimed us to be living in a new kind of nightmare for American literacy while blaming the same old bogeymen. If online reading was eating away at book reading, how did we explain literary weblogs that commanded thousands of readers a day, or book recommendations and dialogue as crucial features in the next generations of social software? If young people were reading less than any other demographic group, how did we dismiss the revolution in young adult literature brought on by J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket, or the best-selling careers of twenty-something favorites like David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Safran Foer?

I didn’t quibble with Reading at Risk’s findings or methodology, since I’m not a statistician and the “what” of the report seemed more salient than the “how.” But I didn’t at all like the collective reaction from the media that viewed the report as a national emergency and the solution as a tsktsk. Were we simply a country of morons fulfilling our insipid destiny? Could we blame sexier, flashier media options with which the humble book couldn’t compete? Those are pat, elitist answers to a complex problem, and America ’s reading public, however big or small, deserves better. If many factors are to blame, as Chairman Gioia asserted, surely some come from inside, from the industries and institutions that depend on a healthy reading populace for their very survival and yet seem to be losing more of it every generation.

For starters, it’s no help that being well read has an enormous image problem in this country, and those who claim to be most bibliophilic are as much accomplice as advocate. We authors give dull, mumbly readings at bookstores and see interaction with readers, at best, as tedious distraction and, at worst, a frighteningly awkward social predicament. Universities, local lecture series, and writers’ conferences are enablers, presenting writers in hushed, reverent tones, as if they were dangerous animals on safari. When books do show up on television, they are seen as playthings of the affluent (Gilmore Girls), the urbane (Will and Grace), or the middle-aged clad in tweed (CSPAN’s Book TV). And when was the last time you heard public radio, that vanguard of a well-read America , treat an author like a human being, warts and all, instead of with the quiet deference reserved for an elderly relative at Thanksgiving?

Is it any wonder that the average person, who might consume movies, television, and music with gusto, ignores literature? That they see books as all good and well for the Lexus and latte set but not sexy enough for Saturday night and not real enough for the world of jobs, rent, and fun when you can manage it?

We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun. But look at how literature presents itself in public; then say loudly, “Where the hell is the fun?”

I may have missed it, but not once during the cacophony surrounding Reading at Risk did I see a representative from the publishing industry stand up and take some responsibility. On the one hand, who could blame the publishers’ representatives? It’s not a great business strategy when your market is evaporating to say that you brought it upon yourself. On the other, dire conditions are often the best catalyst for radical, revolutionary ideas. You’d think at least one publisher would seize the opportunity and say that yes, despite all this bad news, we will take the wheel, turn this ghost ship around, and make tomorrow better than today for books.

No one did.

• • •

I turned thirty-one this year, and working with books is the only adult job I’ve been able to keep. In just under four years of reviewing, analyzing, and creating online communities around contemporary literature, I’ve seen Oprah spar with Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers turn traditional publishing on its head. I’ve seen This American Life do for books what The Daily Show has done for politics, spoken word poets appear on HBO alongside the women of Sex and the City, and authors in their sixties and seventies get turned on to blogging. I’ve seen George Plimpton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Joseph Heller pass on and Zoe, the eight-year-old who consistently wins my local poetry slam, come into her own.

This is an amazing time for books. If reading and literature are in crisis, it certainly isn’t one of apathy but one of seismic rumblings of change that will have a profound effect on the future. The world of books will be totally different tomorrow than it is today, and it will happen much sooner than we think. And since I’ve never been on time for any trend in my life—not indie rock, breakdancing, or parachute pants—I’d rather be at the party now than in an imagined past when a nation read together, authors walked as gods on earth, and publishers went home fat and happy every afternoon.

The writers in this book weren’t around for this age of literature, if it ever really existed (and I don’t think it did). The oldest are in their early forties, the youngest nineteen. They are the second generation to be raised by television, the first to grow up with video games in childhood and the Internet in college. They’ve chosen literary lives not only when the arts offer more lucrative options (club DJ, independent filmmaker, hip-hop mogul) and are doing so when more stimuli and information compete for an audience’s attention than at any time in history. It’s worth asking why they bother. Even more it’s worth learning about the state and future of literature from their choices.

A generation ago, young writers could not begin or accelerate their careers by publishing online as essayists Pamela Ribon, Elizabeth Spiers, Neal Pollack, and Douglas Rushkoff have done. They rarely had the opportunity to see their work as the product of more than a generation of minority advancement as Karl Soehnlein does with gay fiction, or of blended cultural affiliation as Stephanie Elizondo Griest and Vivien Mejia do. They didn’t have to argue for its continued relevance as one part of a reader’s vast multimedia diet as Tom Bissell has in his essay on literature and video games, or as Meghan Daum does in her piece about the new “literary” sensibility of public radio. Nor did they conceive of their books and themselves as part of the worldwide exportation of American culture as Nell Freudenberger had to when asked, at twenty-eight, to give a series of lectures about her debut novel at six universities in China .

If the essays in this book are any indication, something is happening just below the waterline of American literature and moving quickly toward the surface. Social trends are locking into place that show reading still can have a vibrant, active place in our cultural lives. Some examples include:

1. Digital communication: Arguing that youth are neglecting reading in favor of online media ignores one simple fact: The Internet is fundamentally a reading and writing medium. Whereas twenty years ago, instantaneous communication meant picking up the phone, now it means typing an e-mail, an instant message, or a blog post. The number of blogs and online diaries worldwide reached 5 million this year, with half their creators under the age of thirty. Say what you want about the contents. That’s millions and millions of young people writing and reading regularly out of habit.

2. Online conversation: Each day, reading and publishing are more vigorously debated online than anywhere else in the old mediascape. Book-based weblogs like Bookslut (www.bookslut

.com), Maud Newton (www.maudnewton.com), and the e-mail newsletter Publisher’s Lunch are quickly becoming indispensable reads for the involved bibliophile. Online reading communities like Readerville.com have memberships in the thousands. This number may seem small compared with, say, the weekend traffic at AOL, but it hardly seems indicative of the Web dealing the death blow to interest in books either.

3. The McSweeney’s Factor: Whatever your opinion of Dave Eggers and his projects (McSweeney’s and The Believer magazines, The Best Non-Required American Reading series), I recommend dropping by his next event in your area. See how many of the attendees are old enough to rent a car. Using hip graphics, a laserlike eye for talent, and an overarching belief that the whole book business takes itself too seriously, Eggers and company have convinced a generation of young, media-overloaded readers that literature is cool. Contributors to this anthology like Dan Kennedy and Paul Collins got their start writing for the early issues of McSweeney’s and its companion Web site, which brought their work to my attention. Mr. Eggers also runs 826 Valencia , a literary arts and education center in San Francisco that provides tutoring, reading groups, and scholarships to school kids interested in literature. The program and others like it are expanding to cities nationwide. And if you believe satire is the last signpost of success, Robert Lanham’s essay “The McEggers Tang Clan” pays tribute to this movement.

4. Hip-hop America : Hip-hop is the most influential popular music of the last two decades and, not coincidentally, the most lyrically dense. Its influence can be felt in the explosion of interest in spoken word poetry, in new African-American imprints at major publishers, and in the fledgling sector of hip-hop literature. At its core is the symbiotic pairing of “beats and rhymes,” of rhythm and poetry. An entire generation of young people, who might not find their writer’s voice in high school English classes, are finding it in hip-hop lyrics and spoken word performances. Contributor Paul Flores, a novelist and spoken word artist, works a day job educating high school students through these art forms. Nineteen-year-old Nico Cary, whose poem closes this book, is a former student.

5. Culture of collaboration: In his essay, novelist Adam Johnson makes a modest proposal that writers could stand to work together. Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith, novelists and a couple for nearly two decades, collaborated on their essay, exploring the nature of two writers in love and the intersection of their creative orbits. Across America , their peers are taking this collaboration one step further. Events like the 215 Festival in Philadelphia , Info Demo in Atlanta , the Little Gray Books Lectures in New York , and Book Punk in Austin are putting writers on the same stage with jugglers, fire dancers, radio producers, and punk bands, with gloriously raucous and standing-room-only results. The operating principle in each of these events is juxtaposition and collage. We live in a time of comedians covering political conventions, of musicians in corporate boardrooms, of salons, remixes, mash-ups, of all culture on shuffle and slamming up against itself. Rather than getting lost in the mix, books and writers have an opportunity to become a vital part of it. If musicians can act, if filmmakers can write books, if DJs can score cartoons, why can’t authors play in these sandboxes, too? It can only help level needless cultural hierarchies that make the world of literature an island off the shores of popular culture, instead of a bustling province on the mainland. Put another way, why don’t we take the title “writer” as a gateway to hundreds of avenues of artistic possibilities instead of limiting ourselves to books?

6. Culture of transparency: From reality TV to Inside the Actors Studio to filmmakers blogging their shooting schedules, we live in a culture where we expect the creative to be visible. We expect the life and process of artistry to be laid out for us (not like author Michelle Richmond’s, in her essay about her naughty years as an MFA student), explained without our having to ask. We want liner notes, DVD commentaries, e-mail dispatches from the tour. The book is no longer an end in itself, stresses memoirist Tara Bray Smith in her essay, but a jumping-off point for our physical, emotional, and spiritual interaction with the world it came from.

Put another way, the audience isn’t just listening. It’s watching, commenting (as Glen David Gold notes hilariously in his essay about googling oneself), and expecting as much as artists can give them, probably more. Though this elevated level of interaction is undoubtedly more difficult for writers—an introverted lot compared to, say, comedians—it’s also a golden opportunity to reach over the wall and embrace this new closeness to readers, to mobilize it as author Chuck Palahniuk has done with his street teams, to celebrate it as Jennifer Weiner has done with her enormously popular blog, or to simply enjoy this deepened sense of connection readers now expect from authors. That might scare the pants off writers not accustomed to leading their own fan clubs, but it’s where we’ve arrived as a culture (ask Tracy Chevalier). Those who hide from it do so at their peril.

7. Culture of story: Listen to Steve Jobs talk about the latest offering from Pixar, the creators of the Myst video game series and musical epics like the Flaming Lips’ Yoshi Battles the Pink Robots and Jay Z’s Black Album. Their creators all say that, no matter how flashy the effects, in the end it’s all about story: A compelling narrative, an original voice, and characters both relatable and wondrous. We writers are the frontline artisans of story. It’s our world out there, no matter how humble and plain our creations seem in comparison.

I divided the book into four sections, which I hope will serve not only the essays but different families of readers. “Beginnings” looks at how the writers in this collection came to literature as both calling and career, and is inspired by novelist Christian Bauman’s essay “Not Fade Away,” about writing as a young soldier stationed in Somalia . “The Life” picks over the grease and spare parts of being a writer and how it’s as much a job (as journalist Ben Nugent underscores in his essay) as an art. “The Now” takes on many of the big issues facing us as readers and writers. “The Future” gives us a notion, a great one, about where we are going.

Taken to their logical extent, the ideas here point to a world of possibility for the future of books. If writers may begin their careers online and in live performance instead of the freshly scrubbed halls of the Ivy League and MFA programs, imagine what that will do for American literature’s diversity and elitist reputation. If technology was seen as instrument instead of necessary evil, imagine readers downloading reviews and events calendars in wirelessly linked bookstores as they browse, and social software allowing readers to trade books in virtual swaps. If book distribution can be reimagined as McSweeney’s has done, how far must we be from barrels of lendable books in hotel lobbies, bus stations, coffee shops, and on subway platforms? If authors like David Sedaris, Michael Chabon, and Alice Sebold can fill auditoriums across the country, how soon before readers feel the same attachment to their favorite writers and books as they do to their favorite bands? Most important, how can we make this happen and when do we start trying?

I don’t know if many of these dreams can become real given the cold hard business truths of publishing, but I do believe this collection is an invitation to think big. Taken individually, these essays say that this is not our parents’ age of literacy. Together, they argue that the sky is not caving in on American literature. Instead, it is opening above us, and in that unknown lie infinite possibilities. That opportunity reminds me why I started this book in the first place: for the challenge, for the vision of a brighter future, and because living a literary life in the morning of the twenty-first century is more fun than anything else I’ve ever done.

Bookmark now. We’re about to begin the next great story.

Kevin Smokler

San Francisco , California

October 2004

From Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, Edited by Kevin Smokler © 2005