Reading the Long Sentence: From Henry James to Marlon James
The long sentence has come back into contemporary literary fiction in ways that the previous decade's minimalism could not have predicted. What…
Edmund Whitfield writes literary criticism, author profiles, and long-form essays from London, where he has worked variously as a books editor, a freelance critic for the cultural weeklies, and an occasional reader for one of the smaller literary presses. The writing collected here is the writing he wanted to read and could rarely find — pieces willing to take a position, willing to read closely, willing to argue with the books rather than merely describe them. The reviews are reviews of arguments and not of release schedules. The author profiles attempt to read the life through the work and the work through the life without flattening either. The essays on publishing concern themselves with what the contemporary industry actually does to the books it produces, not with the trade-press version of what it claims to do.
Page 28 of 29 337 articles total
The long sentence has come back into contemporary literary fiction in ways that the previous decade's minimalism could not have predicted. What…
The author photograph is a small genre with its own history and its own conventions. The contemporary author photograph reveals more about…
The reviewing of first novels presents a specific critical problem: how to be honest about what the book is doing without imposing…
Davis's very short stories — sometimes a sentence, sometimes a paragraph — have made her one of the most influential American prose…
Krasznahorkai's long sentences have been called untranslatable so often that the cliché has worn smooth. The English versions by George Szirtes and…
The review-page wordage has contracted across the major Anglophone venues over the past two decades. The contraction has changed what the contemporary…
Ernaux's Nobel in 2022 was both deserved and slightly clarifying — it crystallised, for an Anglophone readership that had encountered the work…
Murdoch's opening to her 1978 novel is one of the more carefully constructed openings in postwar British fiction. Read slowly, the first…
Fitzgerald began publishing fiction in her late fifties and was, for two decades, an almost-private writer despite winning the Booker. The recovery…
The Gallant correspondence and notebooks at the University of Toronto have been open to researchers for some years, and they reveal a…
The mid-list — the middle stratum of literary fiction that used to support a substantial portion of the working novelistic career —…
The Rooney novels have been compared to nineteenth-century realism more often than not, and the Jamesian comparison has become standard in the…