Great Novelists such as Twain and Hemingway has passed - Really?

It seems like a tradition, from time to time, an article decrying the decline of literary world, the receding attention span of overall human populace, when snippets and twits started to rule over intricately woven fiction, and the theorists, linguists and the high brow scholars of literature ponder loud and clear about the possibility, or perhaps the certainty of irreversible diminishing of once lauded literary fictions, one must notice the cyclic occurrence of such musings and lamentations.

Here is an extract from The Guardian:

"For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers."

 I don't agree with Sigel's comment. I am not sure where are his observations and data are coming from to declare such a sweeping pronouncement, but the reality is still the world has many contemporary fine writers, story tellers, whose crafts, artistry in fictions, short stories and novels are no less equal than the classical writers like Austen, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, Twain.

Read Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Margaret Atwood's The Year of Flood, any and all of Barbara Kingsolver's great novels like The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel and short stories, Ian Mcewan and Julian Barnes' finest novels are the few humble examples of world's literary prodigies, well shape and thriving with virtuosity in modernity.

Perhaps the main thrust of Siegel's pessimistic argument was "to shake novelists up":

"The critic Frank Kermode once said the novel was a form that revived itself periodically. "The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying; and the main reason for this is that the most intelligent novelists and readers are always conscious of the gap, consisting of absurdity, that grows between the world as it seems to be and the world proposed in novels," Kermode wrote. As a result, writers, from Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne to JD Salinger, plan to write an anti-novel and then end up, Kermode said, pointing "the way to a new novel, a new convention".

Link to The Guardian article: Literary storm rages as critic Lee Siegel pronounces the American novel dead