Like some weird flu, the cellphone-novel is tearing through China and Japan. "In this age, with a flood of information, I thought it was cruel to force readers to wrestle with a 200,000-word book," explains He Xingnian, author of Chinese cellphone novel Out of the Fortress. Well, it's not that hard to read a book, but whatever: each chapter is about 70 words long. Some elitists have called this phenomenon the "cheapening of literature." How dare they! After all, there's a chance that your cell contains most of a novel in text form already. ("He told me my hair looked pretty. What do you think that means?") [NYT]