Philip Roth, a connoisseur of dying animals, calls literature "one of the great lost human causes." He explained to an interviewer: "I don't think in 20 or 25 years people will read these things at all ... there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really."
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I'm not sure I agree. Reading is still an activity the rate of which is controlled by the reader, a form inviting contemplation along the way more directly than other narrative forms. Maybe it is contemplation itself that is dying.
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