Criticism Free to read
The Return of the Doorstop Novel
In an age of the eight-second attention span, readers are buying nine-hundred-page novels. What gives?
Listen · 7 min
Every trend forecast said the long novel was dead, killed by the phone. Instead the doorstoppers are selling out. It turns out a sufficiently good long book is not competing with the phone at all. It is offering the one thing the phone cannot: an ending you have to earn.
Read it slowly, if you can. It was not written to be skimmed, and it gives up very little to the hurried eye.
It continues, at length and without hurry, below.
