Picking up his notebook once more is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the king of magical realism. Publishers are all too aware of the shift. The cheap answer is that there's a gap in the market. Between them, they're teaching journalists their own craft. We are living in revolutionary times, he says, an era of such upheaval political, social, scientific and genetic - that the greatest stories are the ones unfolding before our very eyes.
Fiction is anemic by comparison.
Some writers have been defeated by that fact, retreating into the minutiae of personal experience. But others are daring to take on the challenge. Wolfe's plea, issued a decade ago, was for novelists to become reporters once more. It may have taken a while, but it seems that summons is being heeded at last.