Fourteen years ago, a little-known American author of two novels that slipped into obscurity too quickly for his liking published an essay that did not suffer the same fate. In it, he lamented that his time was so indifferent to literature that Time, the magazine, would never put a serious American novelist on its cover.

But it wasn’t just literary fiction that seemed bound for the cultural scrap heap. A decade later newspapers and magazines throughout America began dropping coverage of books altogether, allotting the vacated space to gaming and other trendy technology.

Books, it seemed, were no longer news. Then, of course, the recession hit, many of those book-spurning publications went out of business as well, and it seemed for a while that the printed word was itself threatened with extinction.

Today, newspapers and magazines remain mired in the bleak outskirts of obsolescence. But books have a happier story to tell. Books suddenly are generating more buzz than they have in a long while.

First, there is the author of that pessimistic essay, Jonathan Franzen. You may have heard of him by now: he appeared on the cover of Time in August.

And the release of his latest novel was so well orchestrated you might have mistaken it for a new Apple gizmo or video game.

But the hype failed to diminish its cultural stature. In The Times, it was proclaimed an American masterpiece, and reviews elsewhere were just about as ecstatic.

A literary novel became the season’s cultural event.

But it was a season that already had seen Chelsea Handler, the immodest host of an American cable TV show with a very modest audience, use the astounding success of a scurrilous new book to shoot to a new prominence, earning her a profile in The Times and the host’s spot at the MTV awards.

And it was with a book that Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thrust himself back into the international limelight. As The Times reported, his book stirred up virulent protests but also sold “as if he were the most popular person alive.”

Even on the technology front, the talk of the season was mostly about books - electronic books, thanks to the Kindle and, even more, to the iPad. As The Times reported, iPad users especially liked the fact that its touch screen let them turn pages as if it were a real book.

But an even more ironic triumph for the book lies in this: a former chief technology officer for Microsoft, a physicist and chef who researched high-tech cooking, chose to release his findings not on a Web site or as an e-book, but as type printed on dead trees. A forest of dead trees: Nathan Myhrvold’s “Modernist Cuisine” will run to 2,500 pages over six volumes and sell for $625. According to The Times, gastronomes “greeted with a collective sigh” recent news of another delay in the book’s publication. A chef predicted it will be “the cookbook to end all cookbooks.”

And perhaps that is what it will take to truly kill off books: not a flashy alternative medium, but a book so good it will make all others redundant. Mr. Franzen, never short of ambition, may already be hard at work on the project.


CARLOS CUNHA