On page 371 of his hyped-up media novel "Turn of the Century" (Random House, 659 pages, $24.95), Kurt Andersen describes a self-conscious, dispirited, middle-aged married couple glumly meeting on a cloudy afternoon. "[The wife] gives a minimal one-shouldered shrug, lighting her Marlboro and squinting down the street toward the bright disk of sun behind the clouds. In her twenties, [she] gave up reading short stories. Right now she remembers why. They all felt just like this moment." Readers of "literary" short stories, and "literary" novels for that matter, know exactly what kind of work Andersen is describing -- a subset of well-crafted fiction that dwells on moments of tiny defeat, spinning glum observations into sham epiphanies.

"Literary" magazines and college writing programs are jam-packed with this aesthetic; it's genre fiction, as easy to spot as any other genre, western or mystery or Scottish boarding school, and it in no way represents the gaudy spectrum of great American writing that is flourishing these days. But for a lot of young readers, all fiction is as punishing as the dull short stories Andersen indicts. Despite all the bookstore cafes, reading groups and hip designer jackets, the bottom has dropped out of the young-reader marketplace. And even if they do come back to books, it will be on their own terms, without even the faintest gesture in the direction of the last couple of generations' classics.

The figures are startling. After eight years of tracking the daily activities of 24,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 99, a market research group in Illinois reported that people younger than 30 now are reading barely half as much as people over 50. And according to the Book Industry Study Group, which tracked the reading habits of 16,000 households, readers younger than 25 bought 20 percent fewer books last year than in the year before.

(This in the same year that MTV's ratings rose 36 percent and the network began adding more text and narrative to its programming, as many as a dozen sentences or sentence fragments scrolling beneath Korn, Britney Spears and Foxy Brown videos.)

The newest modes of cultural transmission -- niche TV, the Internet, direct-demographic magazines -- trump the old modes of cultural transmission -- newspapers, network TV, teachers -- in the minds of young readers. You could very well argue that the book marketplace is a last bastion of baby-boomer-and-older pop-cultural supremacy. But even the most established literary institutions know that they've got to get new blood.

Take the New Yorker. Its 1999 summer fiction issue is devoted to 20, ahem, "young" writers. It's a dense, often thrilling mix of stories by mostly well- established writers. Two of the writers I've never actually read before, Edwidge Danticat and Sherman Alexie, converted me right on the spot. And my two favorite writers in the mix, Matthew Klam and A.M. Homes, contributed stories that stand with their distinctive best.

Klam has the funniest story, an insanely upscale wedding, and Homes has done something utterly new: her story, "Raft in Water, Floating," is a piece of hallucinatory music that reminded me of a cross between Paul Bowles "The Little Prince" and some cheesy early-Eighties teen-age sex comedy. But, um, sheesh -- couldn't they have done something about the full-page ad that sits smack in the middle of this lunar-hip youthful story? Yes, I'm talking about the Viagra ad on page 115, the photograph of an older gentleman dancing "Bridges of Madison County" style with his lucky lady friend.

Regardless of the lame contextual irony, the ad tells you truly who's supposed to be reading the magazine.

In the three or so years that I taught creative writing to freshmen at Johns Hopkins, through 1997, I never had one student -- not one! -- who'd admit to having read a short story in the magazine. I'd photocopy them, pass them out -- usually "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham or "Push" by Sapphire. These were operatic stories with young protagonists, and they knocked my students out.

These were stories that I'd use like bribes so the kids would read the department-assigned James Joyce and Alice Munro stories that, whoa, I'm sorry, stopped class cold. Freshmen thought the stories were "depressing," thought the protagonists were "losers." They didn't mind tragedy, and God knows they loved the narratives of heroes; what they couldn't bear were the fictions that lingered in gray moments of indecision, that seemed to celebrate resignation -- the emotions were too contagious, so my young readers consciously shut them out.

It's not that they weren't smart enough; it's not that they weren't intuitive or discerning readers. It's just that the last thing they wanted was to be told that life was fair-to-middling and brownish-gray when all they had to do was look around them and see that it was far better than that for most of the time and, when it wasn't, it was far, far worse.

If I were to teach those same students now, the one thing I'd do just a little bit differently is lead them through the centuries and point out the history of introspective literature, the classical texts, the 20th-century boom. I'd tell them that every decade had its variations on the same self-regarding themes.

I think that if our writing class as a unit had talked about that kind of writing as if it were just another little blip on the cultural map, my students might have enjoyed satirizing the genre's conventions -- and I know I'd have loved reading a blistering or pornographic caricature of Joyce's bleary-eyed clockwork epiphanies.

I'd probably do one other thing differently, too. I'd introduce my kid-readers to what I can only describe as "bridge-line" books: novels that mysteriously straddle the boundary between adult and young-adult.

These are books brimming with singular storytelling verve, from the point-of-view of young adults, without any sort of elegiac old-gal-looks-back-on-life hooey. I'd start with Ben Schrank's utterly beguiling first novel, "Miracle Man" (Quill, 352 pages, $13). It reads like a pleasure machine: young lovers, the lure of crime, New York City. And it allows its appealing narrator to endure a healthy dose of self-doubt that actually propels him forward, forward to his tragic end -- ambiguity that exhilarates, rather than depresses.

I would make them read Francesca Lia Block's "Weetzie Bat" (HarperCollins, 96 pages, $4.50), a poem of a novel, a fairy tale that makes prose sentences as alluring as the beats of a great pop single. And Michael Hornburg's heartfelt "Downers Grove" (Morrow, 256 pages, $23), whose narrator, self-possessed 17-year-old Chrissie Swanson, makes side-ways mobility look rewarding.

Old people read more than young people. Big surprise. The publisher of Scholastic Books surveyed young people to find out why they weren't reading as much as they used to and, yikes!, she found out that young people fill up their days with "homework. Before school sports. Church. Music. Going to the movies. Hanging out with their friends" (New York Times, July 12, 1999, page C10). Knock me out. Yet Scholastic this very week has two enormous successes on the hardcover fiction best seller list, the "Harry Potter" books, with going-on-2-million copies in print.

Boys and girls and their parents fight for their turn to read these larger-than-life fantasies (New York Times, July 12, 1999, page E1). Kids stampeded to bookstores the afternoon the new volume in the series was released.

Reviewing "Glamorama," Bret Easton Ellis' spectacular youth-culture novel, Walter Kirn wrote, "Of all the fine arts, it's literary fiction that seems most stuck on the idea of permanence, of somehow outlasting its time and place in a way that nothing else does."

But for young readers in the digital age, the exact opposite may be true: everything is permanent, every book, every magazine, every movie and TV show and commercial and ad campaign -- it's all alive, all waiting to be watched, all waiting to be read.

There's no hurry at all.

Ben Neihart's first novel was "Hey, Joe." His second, "Burning Girl," has just been published by Rob Weisbach Books under William Morrow publishers.