In conversation with Emily Hall
This spring I had the pleasure of chatting with Emily Hall about her debut novel, The Longcut, an excerpt of which I first encountered in the fourth issue of Socrates on the Beach. Our conversation — on Bernhard, Beckett, the long sentence, the long walk, prose about visual art, and the demolition of “at-hand language” — appears today in the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read it here.
If that conversation isn’t enough to convince you to read The Longcut, I hope Jack Hanson’s recent review in The Baffler is. In other criticism: I was glad to discover Adam Morris’s foreword to Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, a novel on my mind a lot lately, in The Point. S. C. Cornell, whose excellent review of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or appeared in the second issue of LIBER: A Feminist Review, sent me a gem of a Christian Lorentzen missive on the state of contemporary fiction, from the recent issue of The Drift. Speaking of which, I especially loved Natasha Boyd’s essay on digestive illness, “Sick to Our Stomachs.”
It has been a year of short novels: some highlights include Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais (which I reviewed for Bookforum here), Max Frisch’s Montauk, Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion (discovered after reading her “Diary, 1988” in the spring issue of the Paris Review). And, after years of fidelity to the short story, it has been a year of the novel more generally: favorites of late include Jane Austen’s Emma and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Up soon is V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.
That is all for now. I wish you well, and hereby return to the Fiction with all the verve and efficiency of one Barry Egan.
