In a recent Washington Post story, Michael Dirda described young people sprawled on the floor at bookstores, their eyes riveted on the books in front of them. "In fact", Dirda wrote, "no other readers look quite so utterly absorbed."
The books he is describing belong to a hot, but until recently, somewhat obscure genre that many Americans have never heard of.
It's the graphic novel. And the graphic part has nothing to do with explicit written descriptions of people, places, or events. It refers to the illustrations, or graphics, that, in this kind of book, carry the story as much as, or more than, the words.
Graphic novels, whose format has been traced all the way back to medieval woodcuts and to adult 19th century Japanese illustrated stories called manga, could be called comic strips in book form. But their stories are told in full within each volume.
Graphic novels are mocked in some literary quarters as simplistic, another example of what some consider the "dumbing down" of the American culture.
Writer Alan Moore, for instance, scoffs that, "'Graphic novel' is nothing but a marketing term, meaning 'expensive comic book'."
That's an interesting take, since Moore is, himself, a British comic book writer.
Almost all graphic novels are much more complex and darker than any Superman or Mickey Mouse comic story for kids. Some of them, to quote the Post's Durda, are even "grim and gruesome". And at least one graphic novel called "Maus", spelled "M-A-U-S", in which American Art Speigalman describes the life of his father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, won a Pulitzer prize, one of the world's highest literary honors.