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The Long Form Kindle Edition
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- Kindle Edition
£5.99 Read with Our Free App - Paperback
£10.783 Used from £11.37 17 New from £10.78
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFitzcarraldo Editions
- Publication date12 April 2023
- File size2836 KB
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Review
‘'[S]ometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect.... [M]akes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.'
― Jo Hamya, The Guardian
‘The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.’
― Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath
‘Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.’
― Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch
‘Kate Briggs treats the quotidian rhythms of Helen and Rose, mother and baby, with unusual attentiveness, perspicacity and, most importantly, largeness of thought. This makes The Long Form a radical, celebratory and quite magical consideration of the profound creative possibilities inherent in, and intrinsic to, everyday experience. It’s such a lively and generous book.’
―Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move
‘The Long Form looks at this detail within the context of the structures that surround it, and in doing so Kate Briggs has built a novel that is simultaneously warm and exact, far-reaching and meticulous, generous and wise.’
―Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes
‘Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel…Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.’
― Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue
‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’
― Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t (Praise for This Little Art)
‘I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs’s truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that's as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I’ve read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little, at all.’
― Lauren Groff, author of Matrix (Praise for This Little Art)
‘Brilliant.’
― The Windham Campbell Prize (Praise for This Little Art)
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.Product details
- ASIN : B0BNT6L4YR
- Publisher : Fitzcarraldo Editions (12 April 2023)
- Language : English
- File size : 2836 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 463 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 372,160 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 541 in Essays
- 3,808 in Essays, Journals & Letters
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At the same time, this probes those spaces and thresholds where theory shades into philosophy especially around issues of existence, consciousness, experience and responsibility, of how we 'read' narratives and discourses that are extra-textual.
[author:Henry Fielding|17501]'s [book:The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling|99329] is a marvellously apposite text to weave into this as the book that Helen is reading since it is a kind of 'postmodern' fiction from the eighteenth century (1749) and one of the earliest prose works to be designated a 'novel' in English literary history. Fielding uses some of the techniques that are part of the tool-kit of post-/modernist and contemporary writers: breaking through the fictionality of fiction, self-consciously addressing the reader and thinking about the reception of the text, expanding and contracting the representation of time, and questioning what are appropriate topics for fiction to express.
Briggs also takes a concern with the political from these theorists though she's more radical than the essentially conservative Fielding. She puts into play the Bakhtinian idea of existence as a form of dialogue and reaches out to the reader to play.
For all the stuff I loved, this is, ironically, too long (Barthes termed the novel 'the long form'). In challenging what makes up material for a novel - especially, perhaps, a female-authored novel - this, paradoxically, makes the mundane domesticity of caring for a baby, textually mundane (at least for me). At times, this felt like a very, very long form, indeed!
Nevertheless, Briggs is doing something intellectually dense here that I appreciated. At times this reminded me of Virginia Woolf 'doing' theory - though Woolf had a lighter touch. A challenging read, then, but also an exhilarating one - and one to read and then put back on the pile to re-read.
Through The Long Form Briggs interrogates the nature of representation, the ways that narrative might shape or be shaped by forms of knowledge and experience. She probes its machinery: how it might operate; be structured; what it might contain. As Rose and Helen map out space and time, over days spent in their ground-floor home, Briggs contrasts their experiences with the operations of the novel as form and object. She examines the novel – or rather the British, English-language novel – from a range of perspectives not least its interrelations with the book as material object, something that circulates in wider social and cultural contexts, bringing to mind Chartier and Genette and their ideas about reception and processes of reading, the myriad complex encounters between reader and text.
As much as Briggs is caught up in the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of fiction, she’s clearly invested too in issues about literary value and what stories are considered worthy of being told. This is made explicit by her focus on a narrowly-confined, “domestic” narrative. One that’s centred on care-giving, and notions of the maternal and the consciousness of a baby - the sorts of story and characters that’ve often been judged as peripheral or lacking gravity, all too often excluded from the canon of so-called "serious literature".
Briggs's book's a heavily referential, deeply thoughtful, analytical piece, a carefully-spun web of influences and ideas with a pronounced architectural quality. Briggs is in conversation here with literary theory, philosophy, and fiction - she helpfully includes an annotated list of her main sources of inspiration. She’s also very cleverly engaged in a process of making and remaking the “women’s novel” using it to gesture at wider social, aesthetic and ideological relations. I found this surprisingly compelling although for anyone, including me, who’s studied literary and/or cultural theory she’s often covering familiar ground. Her approach often felt fresh and thought-provoking but it could also feel overly-dense, sometimes stretched out and too reliant on the descriptive. I also liked the concept, which flows from Helen’s interaction with Fielding’s novel, of constructing an argument through juxtaposing and interweaving different genres, but it could also obscure the central points being put forward.





