Close Readings

Sustained close-readings of single passages, single chapters, or single formal moves — the kind of slow attention to the sentence that the contemporary review economy has largely abandoned and that the books reward when it is given.

2 articles

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

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