Adam Kirsch writes about the novel and our current instant-information environment.

In our lifetime, no event has ignited the human instinct to find and create meaning like the 9/11 attacks. From the first moment, Americans spoke of the catastrophe as unprecedented in its enormous deadliness and sheer surprise; it was natural to feel that America had changed forever in a single morning. But on reflection, it’s clear that neither the scope nor the surprise nor the sheer malevolence of the 9/11 attacks was new in human history. Ten years later, it seems that the real uniqueness of 9/11 was, rather, the sheer speed with which we spectators moved from seeing the disaster to interpreting it.

Though many have written fictional accounts of the September 11 attack and some have argued against the need, Kirsch says the definitive 9/11 novel has yet to be written and may never be. (via Books, Inq.)