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Close Readings

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 May 11, 2026 10 min read

Literary History

The Quiet Art of the Short Author Photograph: What Portraits Tell Us About Writers

The author photograph is a small genre with its own history and its own conventions. The contemporary author photograph reveals more about…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

On Publishing

On Reviewing First Novels: A Note on Critical Generosity and Critical Honesty

The reviewing of first novels presents a specific critical problem: how to be honest about what the book is doing without imposing…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 10 min read

Author Profiles

Lydia Davis and the Limits of the Very Short Form

Davis's very short stories — sometimes a sentence, sometimes a paragraph — have made her one of the most influential American prose…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 9 min read

Essays

The Difficulty of Translating Krasznahorkai, and What the English Versions Have Made Possible

Krasznahorkai's long sentences have been called untranslatable so often that the cliché has worn smooth. The English versions by George Szirtes and…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

On Publishing

Why Long Reviews Matter: Against the Compressed Books-Page

The review-page wordage has contracted across the major Anglophone venues over the past two decades. The contraction has changed what the contemporary…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

Reviews

Reading Annie Ernaux After the Nobel: The Project, the Method, the Limits

Ernaux's Nobel in 2022 was both deserved and slightly clarifying — it crystallised, for an Anglophone readership that had encountered the work…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

Close Readings

A Close Reading of the First Twenty Pages of 'The Sea, the Sea'

Murdoch's opening to her 1978 novel is one of the more carefully constructed openings in postwar British fiction. Read slowly, the first…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 9 min read

Literary History

The Recovery of Penelope Fitzgerald: How Her Reputation Caught Up With Her Achievement

Fitzgerald began publishing fiction in her late fifties and was, for two decades, an almost-private writer despite winning the Booker. The recovery…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

Author Profiles

Mavis Gallant in the Archive: A Profile Through the Letters and the Notebooks

The Gallant correspondence and notebooks at the University of Toronto have been open to researchers for some years, and they reveal a…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 7 min read

On Publishing

On the Quiet Crisis in Mid-List Fiction: A Publishing-Industry Reading

The mid-list — the middle stratum of literary fiction that used to support a substantial portion of the working novelistic career —…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 8 min read

Essays

What Sally Rooney Owes to Henry James (and Doesn't)

The Rooney novels have been compared to nineteenth-century realism more often than not, and the Jamesian comparison has become standard in the…

Edmund Whitfield May 11, 2026 7 min read