The standard length for a major books-page review in the Anglophone broadsheets through the 1990s and into the early 2000s was somewhere between twelve hundred and two thousand words, with the longer reviews — at the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books — running considerably longer when the book and the reviewer warranted it. By the mid-2010s, the standard length had contracted across most of the venues that the general literary reader actually encountered. Eight hundred words had become a long review; six hundred had become standard; in the digital editions of several major newspapers, the books coverage had moved toward news-style item lengths in the three-hundred-to-five-hundred-word range. The contraction has continued, with some regional differences, into the present.
The contraction has been observed in the trade press but has rarely been examined for its consequences. The aim of this piece is to do that examination — to set out what compressed reviewing can and cannot do, what is lost when serious reviewing is conducted in the shorter formats, and why the longer review remains, for certain kinds of books and certain kinds of critical work, structurally necessary.
What a long review actually does
It is worth being specific about what a long review accomplishes that a short review cannot. A review of fifteen hundred words has space for several distinct components: an account of what the book is and where it sits within the writer's career or within the contemporary scene; a substantive argument about the book's achievements and limits; embedded close-reading of one or two specific passages that demonstrate what the argument is claiming; and a positioning of the book within the larger conversations — historical, formal, political — that the review can show the book to be participating in.
None of these components is dispensable for serious reviewing. The account of the book is necessary for readers who have not read it; the argument is what distinguishes a review from a synopsis; the close-reading is what allows the argument to be tested against the actual prose; the positioning is what makes the review intellectually substantive rather than merely descriptive. A review that contains all four of these components requires a length that the contemporary compressed format does not supply.
A short review of six hundred words can perform one or perhaps two of these functions adequately. Most short reviews end up combining the account-of-the-book function with a compressed evaluative gesture, leaving out the argumentative and close-reading components that constitute, in the long form, the actual critical work. The result is reviewing that is descriptive rather than analytical, evaluative without being argued, and that fails to test its judgements against the specific evidence the prose provides. The compression is not a stylistic preference; it is a structural inability to do the work that serious reviewing requires.
What books require long reviews
Not every book requires a long review. The compressed format is adequate for genre fiction in established categories, where the relevant judgements can be made quickly and where the reader's interest is principally in whether the book delivers what its category promises. The compressed format is also adequate for many works of popular non-fiction whose argument can be summarised and assessed within a short space. The contraction of book-page wordage is not, in itself, a disaster for these categories.
The disaster, where it has been a disaster, has been for books that require the long form to be reviewed adequately. These include, importantly, the books of literary fiction that work through complex formal strategies and that cannot be assessed without reference to the specific passages where the strategies operate. They include works of non-fiction whose argumentative structure is complex enough that the review needs space to lay it out and to engage with it critically. They include translated works that require the reviewer to position the book within a literature that the readership may not be familiar with. They include the books of recovery — the reissues, the rediscoveries — that need the review to do the work of explaining why the book matters now.
The compressed reviewing economy has, in effect, lost the capacity to review these books well. The reviews that do appear in the compressed format are descriptions of the books, with a brief evaluation, with most of the actual critical work omitted. The books exist; the reviews exist; but the reviews do not produce the kind of critical engagement that the books require to be read seriously. Readers who depend on the reviews to direct them toward serious books are correspondingly less well-served, and the books themselves enter the reading public's awareness with less critical context than they need.
The consequences for the books
The consequences for the books are, when one works through them, substantial. The compressed review economy is structurally biased toward books that can be evaluated quickly. The books that benefit from compressed reviewing — books with simple, declarative arguments, books that fit cleanly into established categories, books whose virtues are visible on a quick reading — receive the kind of reviewing the compressed format can produce. The books that require the long form get short and inadequate reviewing, and their critical reception is correspondingly diminished.
The bias has accumulated effects on the publishing economy. Publishers are aware of which books will receive substantive reviewing and which will receive compressed coverage. Editorial decisions, marketing decisions, even acquisition decisions are influenced by what the contemporary review economy can be expected to produce. The books that the compressed reviewing economy cannot review well are correspondingly less attractive to publishers, and the publishing economy has, over the past two decades, shifted in directions that reflect this. The contraction in the review economy has contributed, in this indirect but real sense, to the contraction in the kinds of books the publishing economy is willing to produce.
The consequences for readers are also substantial. Readers who depend on the books pages for guidance about contemporary literary fiction now receive guidance that is structurally less informative than what was available twenty years ago. The reader who wants to know whether to engage with a complex new novel often has, in the compressed review, only a description and an evaluative gesture, without the argumentative content that would let the reader assess whether the evaluation is likely to track her own interests. The reading public is correspondingly less able to navigate the contemporary literary landscape, and the contemporary literary landscape is, in part because of this, less coherent as a public space than it was when the long review was a more available form.
Where the long review survives
The long review survives in specific venues. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books continue to publish reviews at the lengths that the long review historically required, and their reviewing remains, on the whole, the strongest in the Anglophone literary culture. The TLS, in slightly compressed form, continues to publish substantial reviews. The Yale Review and several smaller literary magazines maintain the long form. A growing set of online venues — Sidecar, the Drift, the Point, several of the Substack-hosted critical projects — have begun to occupy parts of the space that the broadsheet contraction has vacated.
The survival of the long review in these venues is heartening but also limited. The readerships are smaller than the broadsheet readerships were; the cultural reach of the venues is correspondingly narrower; the books that benefit from the surviving long-review economy are those that the editors of these venues choose to cover, which is necessarily a subset of the books that would benefit. The long review survives, but it survives in conditions that do not allow it to play the role in the broader literary culture that the broadsheet review economy used to play.
The survival also depends on continued institutional and reader support. The venues that continue to publish long reviews depend on subscriber bases that are smaller and often older than the readerships of the broader literary press, and the economic viability of the operations is not assured. The long review is not automatically self-sustaining in the contemporary media economy. It requires specific institutional choices, specific reader commitments, and specific editorial labour, and the conditions for these are not abundant.
Why this site, and what this site can do
This site is, among other things, an attempt to contribute to the surviving long-review economy at a small scale. The pieces here are written at the lengths that the books they discuss require, with the structural components that serious reviewing demands. The aim is not to compete with the major venues but to add to the available critical infrastructure for the books that the compressed economy cannot review well, and to do so for whatever readership finds the work useful.
The economy of small literary venues is what it is. The reach is limited. The compensation is generally poor or nonexistent. The institutional support is, for individual sites, absent. The work continues because the writers and editors of the small venues are willing to do it, and because the readers who care about the writing are willing to find it. The conditions are not ideal, but they are the conditions that the contemporary literary economy actually offers.
The argument for the long review is, in the end, an argument about what kind of literary culture we want. A culture in which serious books receive serious reviewing is different from a culture in which serious books receive descriptive coverage. The differences are not minor. The judgements that readers form about contemporary fiction, the careers that writers can sustain, the books that publishers can afford to produce — all of these are downstream of the kind of reviewing the culture supports. The long review is, in this sense, structural infrastructure, and the contraction of the long review has been a structural change. The defence of the long review, where it can be made, has to be made on these structural grounds, and the defence has to be made in the actual production of long reviews wherever the conditions for producing them can be created. This site is one such attempt. There need to be many more.
